Off-the-Wall Solution to the War in Iraq

I was just watching the TV show called "House". Have you seen it? I don't care for the show this season because the characterizations of the main roles are so far off in left field that they are no longer believable. I couldn't sit through the whole episode. It got me thinking: What if some people, especially "powerful people" and their puppet politicians, behave the way 'Dr. House' behaves? It's gruesomely easy to imagine, isn't it?

I've never known someone who was considered "rich". I knew this one man who called himself a Tennessee hillbilly that came close; he grossed a million dollars a year on his truck stop roadhouse he owned, and because he had a pretty expensive wife who wouldn't divorce him, he and his mistress lived pretty simply. I suppose he became a master at hiding his 'riches'. This man was one of those types that were nasty beyond belief - unless you stood up to him and refused to take his crap. If you earned his respect, he was the most wonderful person, genuinely so, and you had a true friend. Sadly, he was killed when a tire blew on the dump truck he was driving, it rolled and cut him in half at the same time the planes were flying into the World Trade Center on 9/11. For the sake of this discussion, I've known other men who were caught up in their power trips that acted like asses too, until you stood up to them and subsequently earned their respect. If you don't earn their respect, they just escalate their crappy behavior and mistreatment of you until you find a way to escape them.

Let's just say that these jackasses are the 10% of the population that has 90% of the wealth, and let's just say that it's the same in every country on Earth. For the sake of argument. The politicians are just the idiot puppets that think they can bask in the wake of that "power" by sucking up to them. 10% of the population seems like a pretty easy number to deal with, doesn't it? They need to be stood up to and knocked off their high horses, wouldn't you say?

I think of the US military and their families and how tough it is on them during deployments. Then, I think of all the day-to-day families, the 90% of the population in Iraq who are trying to live day-to-day in insane conditions because of the idiot antics the 10% and politicians are pulling. We can't blame the Iraqi populace any more than we can blame the US soldiers for what is actually going on in Iraq.

What I propose as a solution to the whole damned mess is to ship that 10% of the population that holds 90% of the wealth along with their puppy-dog politicians off to some place isolated to pull their power plays on each other, duke it out on their own, and leave the rest of us alone! Shoot, they have the money to erect a habitable dome on the moon and get there, and that sounds like a plan to me.

Then the rest of us can live.

Now, which presidential candidate would support this idea?

Awareness Perspective

This evening, I witnessed yet another sunset that took my breath away. It was alive, in motion, changing constantly to give endless beauty and awe. In those moments, no thoughts, worries, muses, distractions existed. Looking up into the vast panorama that is the evening sky brought me to realize not only wonder, but the knowledge that, yes indeed, all is one.

That beautiful sunset was shared with every living thing under it. The 'picture' itself may be different from various vantage points, though I imagine that any vision was as beautiful as the one I witnessed. I became one with all, and I was not alone. Looking up into the sky does that.

As incomprehensible as infinity is, it is uniting. The beauty of a sunset is a signal that infinity is just beyond, giving our senses a way to perceive what lies beyond the limitations of our senses and comprehension; beyond the mundane.

No-Brainer

Thou shalt not kill.

What part of that is hard to understand? That statement, that command, is included in every single religion on Earth! Are human beings so stupid that they have to be told this one, simple, black/white thing over and over?

Discrimination, the News and Billybumblers

I want to believe that the theory behind reporting "news" is to objectively present events. You can talk to any researcher and they will tell you that objectivity is subjective! Then there's the gatekeepers, the pressures of the media owners policies and politics, not to mention the artistic photographers and Adobe Photoshop installed on every computer along with the gender, age, race and religion of the reporter and editor impacting the presentation of 'news'.

When I taught a college Psychology course, I used an exercise that started with me whispering something in one student's ear, that student would whisper to the next one and so on until the last student. I'd ask that last student to repeat out loud what was whispered to him/her and look at student #1's face to witness the incredulity. It was always worth a good laugh because what came out the end was nowhere near the way it started. This goes along with the proven fact that two people standing next to each other witnessing the same event will report two very different things.

I suppose I just supplied a logical excuse for the media's slant on today's current events, the Iraq war in particular. The 'news' I get is filtered through many lenses.

I currently work to support families of deployed soldiers. Talking with wives and mothers and fathers of soldiers in Iraq, I hear what their soldiers tell them about what is going on in Iraq. One mother tells me that her son said that the Iraqi people are very kind, giving, welcoming, trustworthy people, and if we weren't over there fighting the insurgents creating hell there, the fight would come to US soil. More than a few family members have told me just about the same.

My point is that what I see on TV news, no matter what news channel, doesn't come close to what soldiers tell their families, who then tell me, is going on. What is on TV does not tell me what soldiers experience daily, or what life is like for the people who call Iraq home. Why not? I plead with the soldiers' families I talk with to stay away from watching the news. Listen to your soldier who is telling you that what is on the news is nothing like what is happening in Iraq.

What irks me the most about this whole thing is the media's obsession with the political discourse about the war in Iraq, which is even farther from what soldiers say is reality. Hence, I call them billybumblers - both the politicians and the media. I don't know if there is such a thing as a billybumbler or if it's just Stephen King's imagined creature in his Dark Tower series, but hey, the shoe fits. What? Do the politicians get their 'facts' from the media? Look at how many lives their decisions are impacting!

Repeat after me: What is on the news is nothing like what is really happening.

Anthropomorphizing Horses?

A general thought is that the people active in the faction working to ban horse slaughter are those overemotional city dwellers that give animals human qualities. I've read Carl Jung ("The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung", Princeton Paperback, 1990), and here is what I have gleaned from him. He says that dogs and horses have moments of consciousness and said they definitely have souls. His theory is that with humans, instead of a definite line between the conscious and the unconcious there are sparks, lighted areas where what's in the unconscious can become conscious. He said animals have those same sparks, but those areas are the only consciousness they have.

If you look at it in terms of instincts being unconscious and the consciousness providing the will to control or overcome the inborn instincts, then it's logical to say that animals have moments of consciousness. In terms of psychological development, I guess that's as good as any 'line' to define the differences - whether something is able to overcome instinctual tendencies. Jung says that instincts need to have all things just right in order for the instinct to function, like how it is impossible for some animals to breed in captivity - the natural environment is gone, so the instinct to reproduce is squashed, it doesn't work. We tap in to our unconscious where those instincts are by dreaming and daydreaming and through fantasy. What happens in our conscious he calls 'directed thinking' (the more developed thinking is, the less there is the ability to tap into the unconscious contents), but we came on that slowly, and he uses mythology as proof of that. As a species, we are different in our instictual purpose from animals, but some animals are not that far developmentally from us. The training we do with horses (or any other animal) itself is enough to develop 'thinking' since what we are training them to do is go against their instincts.

Survival is an instinct and probably in every living thing. That instinct alone would be enough to say that all animals sense their pending death. I'd even go so far to say that humans are the best at ignoring or denying their death, which may also be a way that instinct to survive pushes them through a dangerous situation. Look at the Holocaust. Most of the world denied that Hitler was killing millions in gas chambers because it was such a horrendous thought, and that denial let him free to do his killing for a few years. I've read several books on it by survivors, and one thing they all do is deny that they would have to walk into one of those chambers. Those that survived did so because they believed that unbelievable situation would end. They held onto this hope even though every day they saw thousands walk into those doors and never come back out again. Is it really just thinking that happens, or can animals somehow know that their mates are gone for good? If animals penned outside a slaughter house hear the screams and smell the blood, can they deny what is going on in there? Animals don't have the ability to think of ways to make themselves valuable to their captors enough to keep them out of that slaughter house as some of the Jews did, nor do they have the ability to deny that impending death. I would have to say the existence of the instinct to survive is solid proof of awareness of pending death.

The differentiation between human and animals is not the human characteristics given to animals that causes slaughter to be an issue. What is inherent in every living thing is the instinct to survive. Jung believed in the "collective unconscious" that every living thing shares, and what "directed thinking" has taken us farther and farther away from. We, as humans, as people, have developed to the point where we have become much less since we are unable to tap into a great part of what we are. It is at the root of why humanity has become more and more inhumane.

It is not the giving of human qualities to animals or the emotional attachment to our pets or even our wish to use the horse as a symbol of our American history that is at issue here. It is more the overpopulation of the planet, the waste of the natural resources that is at the heart of even considering another food source to feed the Earth's hungry people. Perhaps it is a turning point for mankind. Perhaps this issue of horse slaughter is just another reason to examine our "directed thinking" and take seriously the responsibility it implies. WE have changed the environment, so WE have to devise ways that allow natural, instinctual tendencies to function. If we do not, the end result will be extinction for all we call life.

2050 - The New Armageddon

Today's headlines: "Shaken Sadam is sentenced to hang", "California schools to fingerprint students", "Top court to hear major abortion test cases", "Marine species collapse by 2048". Yesterday, I read one article that said that our current population growth rate would need a whole other planet to sustain it by 2050. Hence, my title for today's blog. It's a 'call to action' plea to you, to everyone, to stop and take a look at what is going on right now in Our World.

I don't care about the color of your skin, where you were born on this Earth, or what religion or political party you ascribe to. We are all one: We all have red blood, eat, drink, sleep, reproduce, eliminate waste and breathe oxygen. At the most basic level, we all need food, shelter and clothing to survive and a majority of us spend the majority of our time and energy filling these basic needs.

Stay in the drill down mode with me here, and look at what is going on. Let's keep at this until we reach the fundamentals of our reality. I'm going to throw out a few thoughts and hope it inspires you to consider how you think and feel about it all.

First, examine the concept of the sanctity of life. We are at war, presumably to protect the right to life and the right to choose, right? Sadam is sentenced to death for killing. Abortion is again in the headlines mired in the right to life vs the right to choose issues. The surface of the planet is mostly water and we are now looking at killing everything that lives in water in another 45 years. And yet another freedom is whittled away by fingerprinting children, moving right along with current plans of the government to ID and track every single animal raised for food production.

I'm going to state this bluntly: One of the primary things that seperate humans from the rest of the life on this planet is the fundamental right to CHOOSE. Freedom of choice is a fundamental right that forces responsibility. As a human being, you must take responsibilty for your life - every action, every thought, every feeling. Yes, it is a fundamental right to LIVE, as it is for the birds, bees, blades of grass, trees, fish....., but each person is reponsible for deciding, for choosing, to respect the fundamental right of everyone and everything to live. YOU must choose to define what freedom/choice is and then live, think and feel accordingly. You see, you cannot have freedom without choice - they are one and the same, black/white, yin/yang, etc; one can't exist without the other.

Sadam chose to commit heinous crimes. But, does taking away his right to live reverse those crimes or even come close to paying for them? Two wrongs make a right? Is it ever right for one person to choose for another as in the case of abortion? Again, two wrongs make a right? Take over from here and apply this to our other freedoms as in the case of fingerprinting and depleting the Earth's resouces to extinction. You are responsible for that.

YOU are RESPONSIBLE.

YOU.