On Pointing Fingers

      I am something of a moderate when it comes to politics. I believe that most us, if left to our own devices, generally are. I try to avoid political conversation preferring instead to concentrate on a wider and more inclusive search for knowledge and the truth, something I believe that should be unifying and not divisive. Of course, I could be wrong. Afterall, Jesus said he came armed with a sword implying that even truth can be divisive.

       It's hard not to think about politics nowadays. It's is steady being thrust into our faces like a little brother holding up his  skid marked underwear and telling us to 'smell this'. It would be like trying to ignore a Doberman chewing on your ankles to think that you are somehow going to be magically able to avoid being splattered with all the shit that so many of our dumbassically inclined fellow citizens are throwing without aim.

       My biggest fear though is the loss of the Middle. Who stole it and where has it gone? Americans used to be able to talk to one another, disagree about some stuff, and still be able to go on with life with a great respect for the fundamental decency of our friends and neighbors. This is no longer the case. If we so much as disagree as to which day is better for watering our lawns, we are labeled as being, selfish, racist, Nazis or Commie scum.

       What has changed? How about the fact that we have a media that traffics in lies and selling garbage and a too compliant and often comatose populace who thinks that this a normal state of affairs. Ninety-five per cent of our news media says the same thing at the same time with the same exact words. We used to be able to see that as a red flag telling us that something was seriously out of whack. No longer.

        Our politicians lecture us. A politician's job, as our servant, should never include lectures. Lectures are our parent's responsibility. Politicians are not our parents as much as they would like to pretend. They work for us and not the other way around. They are more like gardeners, painters, carpenters, lawyers or doctors. We are not their children and even less their employees to be ordered around.

        Movie stars, musicians, comedians and professional athletes are being paid millions of dollars to divert our attention away from the search for truth and from learning how to deal with the fact of our mortality. They speak on behalf of corporate masters and often feel compelled to justify their own sell out by pretending to be preternaturally wise, politically enlightened, paragons of virtue which the rest of us should emulate. I can only take that to mean that I should just take the product and not criticize the hand that feeds them even when it is my own.

          They are not being paid enough, however,  to tell me that I'm a bad person just because I think that many of them are freaking idiots and  sell outs on top of it. How about this, how about you come to terms with the face you shave and put makeup on before you tell me anything about who I am as a person. Try doing it without drugs or alcohol. Try doing without projecting your own lack of self worth upon me and friends.

       Then try doing it with the knowledge that using the word 'woke' to describe yourself pretty much marks you as a poser. (Real people don't feel the need to place a label on the idea of being a decent human being. That only comes from the deep seated feeling of insecurity that people don't seem to be noticing just how much better you are than everyone else.)

           Our problems began years ago when people first learned that they could create some rules and dogma that would enable them to charge admission to heaven. Even then people didn't want to do the real work involved in the spiritual contract and if a ticket could be purchased that would bypass the need to not covet your neighbor's goods, well so much the better. The fact that people should have known that the ticket would ultimately only take them to a shabby little grave on the outskirts of nothingness and bought them anyway, should tell us a lot about our current predicament. The idea that the Church sold them, even more.

         We got further sidetracked when the Pope told Galileo to shut up about Copernican theory or be burned. This created the enmity that now exists between science and religion that has resulted in the idea that human beings are somehow a lot smarter than the creator of an infinite universe. These enlightened fools, while trying to maintain their own 'wokeness', thought it was a good idea to chain us all to a Newtonian treadmill that leads only to oblivion. Quantum physics has since proven that this was a bunch of bullshit, but, so far, they want to keep that knowledge to themselves even though it offers up a bridge back to more honest approach to dealing with humankind's spiritual needs.

         And as foolish and vain as humans sometimes are, we fell for it all because we were able to make great margaritas with the blenders which science had provided. And as long as the McDonald's drive through was open,  pizza could be delivered, alcohol bought and consumed in copious amounts, and nothing got between us and the Super Bowl, we were willing to let politicians handle the homeless problem while pretending that a disproportionate amount of the dirty wrinkled bills we pulled out of our pockets and threw at them wasn't ending up in their own pockets and the pockets of their cronies.

        I don't like talking politics mainly because we always seem to blame and point our fingers in the opposite direction and away from the one person who has really come to exemplify the problem.

         If we no longer have a middle inside of us which would allow us to hold our material needs in balance with our search for truth and meaning, how can we honestly expect for it to be restored in America?