[Originally published on December 25, 2017]
This is my first Christmas alone. It's not so bad. Hermit mode may become my norm, if society survives long enough. In any event, solitude affords me the space to express from the depths of my soul, in ways that socializing does not allow. It is a place where I feel most confused but also most alive.
This is my first Christmas alone. It's not so bad. Hermit mode may become my norm, if society survives long enough. In any event, solitude affords me the space to express from the depths of my soul, in ways that socializing does not allow. It is a place where I feel most confused but also most alive.
As alluded to above, humanity is quite close to thermonuclear war. The head of North Korea is a paranoid, narcissistic dictator. The same is true in the United States (though Trump is not a full dictator as of yet). Both leaders use fear and hate to herd the masses. Their method? The stark simplicity of a binary ethos: we are righteous, the other side is essentially evil. It is an historical tactic, one that readies the population for war and motivates the soldiers to kill without qualms. It is a tactic that has demeaned and debauched the human condition for millennia. It has led to all kinds of slaughter and infernal cruelty. Hatred and fear for those on the other side of a stark ethnic divide. It is an addictive condition. One that gravitates, and at some point accelerates, toward the infliction of genocide.
Figuratively speaking, to be ready, even eager, to kill a whole demographic of people, such as Muslims, is to worship your own god of hate. It only adds to your utter failure that you claim to champion the good.
As I've said many times on this blog, unless we transcend Manichean tactics, we will not be able to weld the great power of recent technologies. Misuse of said technologies will destroy us.
Why do people like Donald Trump rise to the top? Absence of a conscience helps one appear confident. Combine such immunity to guilt with an utter conviction that you are always right. That it is your destiny to win. Add a certain skill at rhetoric, especially concerning the manipulation of those prone to fear of 'the other'. Add an anti-intellectual platform of us-versus-them. These factors lift a person like Donald Trump. He deceives with ease, a mere game for him, while climbing up rungs of pettiness, rancor, and tragedy to achieve the throne.
Conditions were ideal for this "malignant narcissist." A fertile field of resentment and bigotry was already in place. Angry white males, traditional hierarchists, know-nothings, racists, nativists, patriarchals and supremacists rallied to the call, not so subtle, in the motto, "Make America Great Again."
In one of the most pitiable displays of ethical failure in American History, perhaps in the course of human civilization, the Republican leadership bowed down. It was an act of submission that epitomizes the decline of the American empire. They sold out for the most venal of reasons, to maintain personal power and avoid political loss. Their short-term strategizing went so far as to delegitimize the USA as a moral leader in the global community.
Figuratively speaking, to be ready, even eager, to kill a whole demographic of people, such as Muslims, is to worship your own god of hate. It only adds to your utter failure that you claim to champion the good.
As I've said many times on this blog, unless we transcend Manichean tactics, we will not be able to weld the great power of recent technologies. Misuse of said technologies will destroy us.
Why do people like Donald Trump rise to the top? Absence of a conscience helps one appear confident. Combine such immunity to guilt with an utter conviction that you are always right. That it is your destiny to win. Add a certain skill at rhetoric, especially concerning the manipulation of those prone to fear of 'the other'. Add an anti-intellectual platform of us-versus-them. These factors lift a person like Donald Trump. He deceives with ease, a mere game for him, while climbing up rungs of pettiness, rancor, and tragedy to achieve the throne.
Conditions were ideal for this "malignant narcissist." A fertile field of resentment and bigotry was already in place. Angry white males, traditional hierarchists, know-nothings, racists, nativists, patriarchals and supremacists rallied to the call, not so subtle, in the motto, "Make America Great Again."
In one of the most pitiable displays of ethical failure in American History, perhaps in the course of human civilization, the Republican leadership bowed down. It was an act of submission that epitomizes the decline of the American empire. They sold out for the most venal of reasons, to maintain personal power and avoid political loss. Their short-term strategizing went so far as to delegitimize the USA as a moral leader in the global community.
And of course there is the potential for WWIII ...
Many pundits have remarked on the horror of going to war with North Korea. From what I've seen, the focus is on what will happen to South Korea and possibly Japan. The potential death toll is stated as being in the hundreds of thousands. Sometimes it rises into the millions. What is missing from this morbid calculus is one simple factor: the launch of a single nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Uncertain rulers in other places would be inclined to push their own red buttons.
China and Russia, for instance, have already indicated that they will attack the United States if we attack North Korea first. That's World War III right there.
Given the phenomenon of chaos that would ensue as a result of any attack--a phenomenon commonly referred to as the 'fog of war'--how could any side be clear on who launched first?
It's that dire. Christmas, December 25, 2017.
Kim Jon-in overlords a hell-on-earth of totalitarian mind control, backed up by Nazi-level concentration camps [1]. Donald Trump has been called a "malignant narcissist" by scores of highly accredited psychologists. Twenty-seven of them co-wrote a book to warn us [2].
This is the world in which I find myself, Christmas, December 25, 2017. It is a human-crowded planet on the brink of holocaust and fire. The ruler of the mightiest military on Earth is insane. He is inflexible even in the face of obvious empirical truths. He cannot adapt. In his mind, he is always right.
Christmas, December 25, 2017. If war doesn't claim us, there is always human-caused environmental collapse. We are in the midst of a mass extinction event. Global warming is unprecedented, quicker in effect than the rhythmic Ice Ages. Of course, Trump denies its existence and mocks those who agree with the international scientific consensus.
I open pages on the internet (itself a quite new invention) and see large areas of India and China saturated by stygian smog. I see Venezuela, recently a 'first world' country, chained to misery and malnutrition. I read about Jakarta, home to 30 million people, sliding more and more into the sea.
That's just a sampling from one week of headlines.
Christmas, December 25, 2017. Despite all this, believe it or not, I am happy.
I've been grappling with the heaviest of issues for decades. I struggled to earn a PhD in applied ethics. I published almost a thousand poems, many of them the equivalent of prophetic rants. I battle ignorance in the world and within myself, usually to little avail; and yet sometimes I glean a speck of insight or catharsis. My life journey--in its stupidity, stumble, and seek--has wandered to find some themes of beauty, joy and goodness. Omnipresent themes in the fabric of nature. Themes reactive to the dark.
"What if this present is the world's last night?" To answer this, I would say that love soars in so many ways, has showed us so many paths to paradisiacal futures, even if they will not be ours to take
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