Issues and interties

[ravan]

Lately I've been posting a lot about my friend that is in the process of dying. I am amazed at how much mindshare this has taken up. Then again, no one in my family has ever died slowly - it's always been heart attack, stroke, or auto accident.

This has been a slowly steepening curve towrd oblivion for the last 2+ years. I knew it was trending this way then, and I thought I was ready for it. Nope.

The fact that I've been hard core unemployed for 16 months has both helped and hindered. It's like my professional life won't pick up until I have sent my friend on around the wheel. I knew this, too, about a year ago, but not that it was definitely this friend - I though it might involve my remaining grandmother.

I have to laugh when people say the "recession" is over. Companies are still downsizing massive numbers of people. We are in a depression, and it is deepening, and soon we'll have Bush's fucking war to pay for too, with our taxes and our (or our kids') lives. More death.

The whole 9/11 thing basically accelerated the death of freedom in this country. Like my friend, it isn't dead *yet*, but close. Just like the economy.

The final death: hope. Like N's life, US freedom, the US middle class, and peace itself, my level of hope for the world is in that "drain circling" mode that all the rest is. It hasn't quite gone down the drain totally, but it sure isn't staying in the basin.

It seems that the last few companies I worked for have all died, or are dying, slow, lingering, drain circling deaths.

The economy has been circling the drain since 2000, getting slowly, and inexorably worse.

The political climate, and the consequent trashing of liberties, has become more dominated by the Religious Reich and the politics of wealthy special interests. The 2000 selection was a major symptom of this.

The middle east mess has been getting worse on the same kind of curve.

My friend has been declining since about then too.

Is it a psychic malaise that permeates our entire world, that somehow affects the sensitive worst, in their area of most vulnerability?

How do we stop the death slide, or at least bring flowers out of the ashes? Where is our Phoenix essence, that we can bring beauty out of destruction and chaos? What magic do we need to work, within ourselves and in our world, to change the "dying mind" that stalks the zeitgeist and pushes our acquiescence to the slide into chaos, repression, abuse, poverty, and haterd?

How can all of the mages, witches, shamans, psychics and other "aware" people change it, without trite little "love ins" and "meditations on global peace" (that obviously haven't worked)?

What can we do, every day, just with ourselves and our close friends, to counter the galloping slime of futility and hopelessness that is dragging the world into oblivion?

It's not just a single issue, or a separate set of issues. It's all intertied, and I've been seeing glimpses of the horrible pattern (and pattern of holes that comprises it) for the last two years. I haven't got a big enough stopper for the drain alone.

Comments

Death, dying, maliase and mayhem

[(Anonymous)]

1 of 3

Synchronicity is remarkable, innit? Luckily, I still have a job for the time being, though I won't know if it'll continue past February at this point (last minute reprieve from layoff notice given for 1 October). Meanwhile, I've been watching most of the other computer geeks I know either get laid off or be terrified they're next on the layoff list. Being union doesn't seem to help either (even if you're one of the rare geeks who is). Things are bad all over and the totallyspiffindifilousrecovery the media and the government have been promising us is happening seems nowhere in sight.

'Psychic malaise'? Well, to an extent, certainly. You take X-amount of people, put Y-amount of them into financial distress, add a heapin' healthy dose of McCarthy-ism...er...excuse me...'terrorist menace', over-season with media hype and stir until boiling. There's enough sh*t floating around the ambient at this point, I'm surprised anyone can function.

Then there's all the other sh*t 'psychically sensitive' people are putting out there. There seem to be a lot of 'confusion to mine enemies' workings on both sides, and I'd hazard to guess that several of them are cast / run by folk who're not awfully bright or known for forethought / consideration of likely consequences of their actions.

The media concentrates hard on hyping events to the point of insanity; scaring viewers as hard and as often as possible, pimping for ratings, its stories like overworked whores who they just keep beating harder the more tired and dragged-out they get: Your child is in danger! Watch our show! We'll tell you all about the danger later in the broadcast! But first, these commercials.... The evil terrorists are coming! The evil terrorists are coming! Where could the next bomb be? Or the next anthrax-laden envelope? Could *YOU* be the next victim? We'll have more on that later. Meanwhile, a word from our sponsors....

So yes, there's a 'psychic malaise' out there. And it's getting worse.