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, maliase, and mayhem

[(Anonymous)]

2 of 3

And yes, the United States is dying, too. Constitution and much-touted 'freedoms' eroded away by decades of keeping ahead of the 'Russkies', its people well-trained not to question anything their government does in the name of 'national security', it needed a new menace when its current arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, collapsed a decade ago. For a while it was 'War on Drugs!', a virtual reinstatement of the Volstead act, which has only reaffirmed what the public learned in the 'Twenties: Prohibition doesn't work. It only makes matters worse.

But the 'WoD' did manage to erode the Constitution even more. And now we've the evil terrorist menace, which takes the place of the evil communist menace, and all the superannuated cold-war horses in the second Bush administration are recycling the old 'communist menace' scripts and braying them from D.C. as loudly as possible.

"Why do they hate us so?"

Er...well, we've been playing International Superpower Thug since the USSR bagged it, withdrawn from several strategic treaties on the grounds that "we're the biggest, baddest military force on the planet - we can do whatever we want and nobody can stop us", threatened to start using tac-nukes both on the battlefield and as first-strike weapons (and there's the little thing about us having a history of using 'Da Bomb' against civilian targets), and then to top it all off, the Bush administration starts issuing statements telling the rest of the world that it's decided it has the right to replace 'terrorist' governments, and in other statements neatly defines 'terrorist' governments as the government of any nation which the US sees as opposing its (our) international interests. Go figure.

"They're jealous of our freedoms!" Er...no. That one didn't work for the USSR, and it doesn't work today. In fact, we're far from the 'Most free nation on the planet' or the 'Beacon of freedom lighting the darkness to show the rest of the world the way', despite the frequent speeches, press releases and media hype assuring us we are. In fact, most of the world views us more as a brutal, steroid-inflated thug who keeps trying to hold the rest of the world at gunpoint, whether militarily or financially. Truth is, we're actively working hard to take over the rest of the world - economically - and bind it to our control via finance. We've traded military warfare for economic warfare, but we're actually more aggressive than we've ever been as a nation, even in wartime. *That's* why the 'planes hit the WTC along with the Pentagon. Because unlike the American public, the rest of the world knows that it's economic imperialism they have to worry about far more than military imperialism, where the US is concerned. Oh, and for the record, I don't believe the fourth plane was headed for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was , IMO, probably headed as a backup for the Pentagon. Yes, I could be wrong. So could you. So could the US government.

So yes, there's a lot of sh*t flying around out there, no 9/11 puns intended.