Magia Bella: bella-magic.com

I love Joe Bageant’s blog, and am shamelessly reposting his reply to a woman who was annoyed with another writer’s stereotyping of “liberals”. I’ve emboldened the lines at the bottom that I find priceless, and I’m right there with him. Enjoy!

If every liberal in America fit that latte sucking, chard chewing stereotype (though a large number in places such as Manhattan and San Francisco and many metropolises seem to fit, from my experience) our election results would not be so close (even discounting for GOP vote theft of recent years).

But in all fairness, I must say that Americans of every political stripe — including me — suffer under their own political hallucination, 100% of which is created by the media. One of course is the neocon “every man for himself” in a (rigged) free market whereupon a man or woman’s destiny and prosperity is supposed to be available to anyone with the “initiative” to beat his neighbor in some sort of national competition for material productivity (wealth). The other hallucinatory promise is one of kindness, equality, charity and justice.

Neither party now delivers on those hallucinatory promises.

But nevertheless, the choice citizens make between the two speaks volumes. Not about the person’s goodness or meanness of heart and spirit, but about their level of fear. Conservatives tend to be somewhat fearful to start with (which is common sense — the world ain’t no bubble bath in Eden). And the new breed of ultra conservative Americans are terrified deep inside, despite their bluster and aggressiveness, their grab at every material opportunity — materialism being the only terms in which they understand security. Mainly because fear reduces homo sapiens to fall back on our deeply seated reptilian survival brain. To my mind the choice one makes, even if the offering is a state sponsored hallucination, represents at least to some degree the humanity with which one chooses to view life and live life. Some of us have a natural revulsion of choosing to be lizards, preferring peaceful, kind, non-aggressive lives pursuing the currently much sniggered at path of “truth and beauty.” The lizards of course see such people as their natural prey.

In the end, like you, I choose the legion of kindness, equality, charity and justice. Even if we do seem to be marching off the cliff of destiny, as all civilizations and super powers of any era inevitably do.

When I hit the bottom I will be in good company. And when we look around we will see ole Mike and the rest who made the opposite choice right there beside us. The calamities of national folly and hubris play no favorites.

And if we are truly people of mercy and charity, we will not harbor blame or revenge. Because the “great game” being played, the game in which we were always pawns, is bigger than all of us. And the solution, to the degree that there is one, is not national, not political, but rests in universal humanism, which is mightier and more enduring than any nation or its politics.

Meanwhile, because we must live our beliefs in order to claim them, I extend the hand of brotherhood and good will to all others who have made different choices than I, including Mike, right up until the time his tribe comes knocking on my door to take me to “the camps.”

Then I start shooting.

We truth and beauty types have a lizard brain too.

In art and labor,

Joe

photo credit: lincolnblues

Language. One of the biggest blessings AND curses we human beings bear and employ.

In working with the land this season, I’ve been made aware so keenly of the knife’s edge of life and death, of our ancestor’s burden of survival. Those of us with resources have remade parts of the world to ease that burden, but many of us have also in turn made life worse for other beings. The spiritual journey at this point is to figure out how to balance the burden, come to some sort of respectful equilibrium between myself and that which feeds me: in both the literal and metaphorical sense. But the words to describe this awareness - in a way that does not come across as nihilistic - are not there. The understanding that the cycles are inescapable is freeing on a deep, deep level. So much of what we say and do, above these cycles, just doesn’t matter in the long run.

Words. I fucking hate them sometimes. The stories we spin to explain ourselves to ourselves seems to only kick up an internal dust-storm, clouding our vision and further feeding into other’s storms. Right now I listen to others, read their stories, and want to shake everyone. Wake up! Put on your protective goggles and filter mask! Can you eat dust as a meal? No! Stop and breathe for a minute! This moment will pass. If you’re not careful, your whole life will be nothing but one big dust-storm, and you will die without knowing the sun and rain on your skin.

I’m not making sense. I don’t know if I can. I’m not the only one who as walked this path and felt this way, but the frustration I feel in not being able to explain… I’m not sure where the light is at the end of this tunnel.
photo credit: Ben Cooper