Vox WillowBear

If you could write a book about anything, what would it be about?

Three friends living in a country cabin within driving distance of a big city. (I figure one is a jock, one is doing a PhD thesis, and one is an ESToid dance therapist ... or something.)

Let the fun begin!

*X-posted from my LJ*

A while back the kidz at CambrianHouse got a
mascot ... a goat. (Yes, a goat!)
They had a contest: guess the goat's weight.
I looked at the snapshots and figured it weren't 
no big goat, so ummmm ... well,  I raised goats 
back on the land in Cape Breton, soooooo le'see 
now ...
heh ... UPS came by this morning and delivered a 
little Casio digital camera. *schweeeeet!* 
Once a photographer, always a photographer, I guess
 ... had never used a digi-cam before but I charged up the battery, fired the 
thing up, went out my back door and called for the neighborhood mooch ... and 
in no time at all there he came, prolly figuring I had breakfast for him 
(which I did). So here are 2 of my very first 3 shots.

*I wrote this to explain something I wrote yesterday, after having watched "Power of Nightmares"

I had written "Don't you realize that you're going to go insane? Really and truly ... you don't have the balls to handle the guilt. You ain't no Wolfowitz or Perls or Cheney." One of my readers replied with a question:

"What if you can admit that to yourself? Then what do you do?"

In the moment I came up with was this partial reply :

"Every successful project I've ever worked on succeeded because everybody involved did what they could, whatever they could, in whatever way they could.

A lotta times over the past ?what? 20+ years I've come up with lists of tips or actions or entry points or something like that ... one time, early 80s (I was giving talks about the "slippery slope" of small smart weapons like the cruise missile) someone asked me something like that and I answered, "The biggest thing you can do for the movement is to find an answer that fits you and your own situation."

Now, so much further down the road, so many times waking up and realizing *shit!* no milk for coffee and 10 days of macaroni to go, I've boiled it down to something simpler: not nothing.

See, the mind-phuck / blue pill reality of it is that it all hinges on self-determination, self-authorship ... what I think is the core of real citizenship. (When I get into this theme I point to a little page I made: CityZen ... I put some time in to make that page, and I put some time in creating support material, but fact is that almost 0.0% of the people who visited the page bothered to click the email button.

The real gold mine, to my way of thinking? Like minded folk ... course there's always the possibility of group-think, but still.

Anyhow, the real pathology comes when we stiffle the intuition, the urge to do this or that or the other ... nipped in the bud. That "stiffling" poisons us ... we end up sabotaging anybody who shows initiative. ("Who the hell do they think they are!")

Sorry I can't advise "Insert credit card and press the keypad to indicate your selection" ... it isn't like that.

Follow your bliss!"

I felt that was incomplete (of course!) so I tried to flesh things out a bit.*


Maybe I owe folk a bit of an explanation

X-posted from my "Togo of Grande Smials" LJ.

Stalin and his supporteres were on the left ... but monstrously inhuman.

Hitler and his supporters were on the right ... but, again, monstrously inhuman.

So guess what: those simple categories don't turn the trick.

So what, then? Being hyper-zealous? (That produces dangerous clones.) keeping our head down and doing our daily thing? (That produces slave-like clones.)

Here's my bottom line when it comes to things political/sociological: there are basically two modes of being ... in one we push our worldview onto everyone and everything around us; people become objects, means to an end (convince, coerce, conquer. or, more passive-agressive, manipulate and con and ignore) ... in the other we're responsive, as though not needing to deal from the bottom of the deck, as though not thinking we can author a fiction that will work better than actuality, as though there's something to "The truth shall set you free."

See clearly ... know what is ... act with confidence.

The most radical aspect of revolutionary activity is open responsiveness, an authentic engagement with whatever's at hand.

Blue pill gets us to justify and rationalize anything, whether that's eating shit from the boss ("It's just the game people play to weed out those who shouldn't rise") or being heartless to the people around us ("S/he has to start taking responsibility for his/her own shit.")

The successfully corrupt share a set of basic lies. Look at the way the Vice President of the United States has skewed things around so that his former corporation gets sweetheart deals ... or the way a massive institution failed to respond to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

And what if most Muslims in developing countries are ignorant peasants (which really isn't true)? They don't hate Americans cuz Americans listen to iPods; they hate Americans because Americans are cheats and liars and thieves. That isn't true? Try living the life of a straight arrow ... first thing you'll realize is how there just isn't community anymore; the best a person is likely to encounter is more like a band of thieves, or a frat ... foundationally corrupt ... corrupt at every turn.

What if only 1 in 1000 are hero like you? You think that 1 will be obvious to you in 5 minutes?

Decades of blue pill activity have left folk brain-damaged.

Fact is, most folk actually don't believe in anything ... the situation is ripe for fascism (as if right-wing fundamentalists haven't already screwed the nation).

Anybody who devalues themselves or another human being is anti-democratic. The whole point is that the development of the individual is the key.

Kumusta to you too!

And Tashi Delek! 8-)

Coincidental with my Vox invite ...

Do you realize that doesn't really mean "fluke; random chance"?
It's all about correlation ... karma's tricky shiet; you think you got it figured, you let your attention wander and *poof* welcome back to BewilderVille!
All effects have causes; hardly deterministic. (heh ... like software ... we're all of us ''cargo cult''!)
There's a certain entailment there, yaa?
Thus is the nature of dependent origination. But I'm getting ahead of myself; hand me a beer when I do that, wudya? *How's that for ''operant conditioning?! huh huh*

... the word "kumusta" brought me to a lovely forum thread on ''All languages: You will be loved''

A nice bit of symbiosis!