Forum / America Lets Down the whole world and Stabs Itself Through the Heart in the Process

Darryl Price
Nov 06, 01:49pm

It's hard to say where we live now. It's unrecognizable. The awful truth is, the ones who let us down are your neighbors, some of your own friends, and even some family members. It's hard to take. It's shameful, what they did, in record numbers, but not unexpected. They have romanticized the Middle Ages, of all places, and want to go back and live there. They think this is a very good idea. Women should not be allowed to make decisions for themselves (a record number of women agreed with this old fashioned notion by voting in that direction). The crowd, as it always seems to do, called out for Barabbas instead of Jesus, and they have the gall to do it all in the name of Jesus! How ironic is that? At least we'll be entertained, they shout, shooting their parade of hot guns in the rabbity air between big toothy smiles and Bro handshakes. The People have lost again their right to exist in freedom from those who wish to enslave them for profit and sport. But they did it to themselves! How crazy is that?

Now, tell me something good: this Thanksgiving I still intend to bow my head and take a moment to be thankful for everyone I know and love, for all the Truth, Beauty and Goodness that yet exists everywhere and for all time, here or there, no matter where. I will hope and pray for a return to sanity, compassion, and working together to build a better world for everybody, not just those I agree with, but even those I disagree with. I will refuse to promote hate in any form towards any others. I will do my best to be honest and helpful and caring as I walk through the world daily. I will not give up on my own dreams. I will write, work and play, and paint, and make love, read books, watch movies, and celebrate all life with my whole heart and soul. And this Winter, if the snow is deep enough, I will build a good-looking snowman in front of my house, and go sledding in the park, and drink cups of steaming hot chocolate afterwards with my family and newly made friends all around. Friends like you.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 06, 04:32pm

I woke up and scribbled all kinds of words and then sang Sheryl Crow and Amy Winehouse karaoke. This is all adding grist to the mill for my next novel. Just received my seventh rating for Bullshit Rodeo at amazon so I can blow up some balloons for that. More than twenty people have told me in person or through email how much Bullshit Rodeo meant to them but...six reviews at Amazon. My favorite novel of all time, Scorpio Rising by R.G. Vliet, has five reviews at Amazon. I wrote one of them.

I haven't had a uterus since 2011, haven't had sex since 2016, have maybe $100 to my name right now, but I showed the fuck up last night. I stood in line for an hour and a half in my grey boots. I asked for a sticker. They were out of stickers.

I woke my son up for school this morning and told him it's going to be okay. We're going to make our music and read our books and write our books and love like that's all we got because it kind of is.

People can get excited over gender reveal cupcakes and baby showers and their gun collections and their version of god. I call them the Great Value crowd. Not kind of me. But I'm just tired and sick to death of hypocrisy and smallness and idiocy.

I speak random Spanish at my monetized YouTube channel and get the occasional comment. "Why are you speaking Spanish?" Discuple. No entiendo.

Jose Alfredo Jimenez summed it up with much style in a favorite song of mine, "Camino de Guanajuato."

I look white. It's a disguise.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 06, 04:34pm

oops...disculpe! no entiendo!

Chris Okum
Nov 06, 06:47pm

Our country has spent the last 20 plus years shrugging its shoulders at acts of random violence where men walk into public places, including schools, and slaughter innocent men, women and children. If that didn't let you know that something was seriously, irrevocably wrong with our culture, that we were headed for some kind of mass seppuku, then you need to go back and look at these events, at the men who enacted them, and work backwards from there. I have been telling everyone I know for as long as I can remember that these mass shooting were the canary in the coalmine and I was consistently greeted with eye rolls and, 'Oh, that's ridiculous.' I'm sure people still think that. Oh, what do mass shootings have to do with Trump, with what just happened, with what's about to happen. They have everything to do with it. Again: any country that does not care that its children are being obliterated in school by men with assault rifles is headed towards collective suicide. And so we are. Things are about to get real bad, real quick.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
Nov 06, 10:36pm

I keep telling myself, "It's only four years." I'm 75 and time while it means more than ever to me also means less--an advantage of longevity I guess. But cars are being randomly hit by bullets on I40 in Wake County NC as I write this so the next four years may seem like a long, long time.

David Ackley
Nov 07, 06:29pm

"Don't mourn. Organize."

Chris Okum
Nov 08, 11:33am

America is in the throes of a mass psychosis event, or, in Carl Jung's words, a "psychic epidemic." You all understand how this ends, right?

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 08, 07:33pm

Psychic epidemic. Yeah. I can see that. I was made for tough times. I'm Gen X. I was raised by MTV and the After School Special. I had to learn early on how to be resourceful and independent. I'm just worried about my son and his Gen Z peers. These kids have been helicopter parented to death. My son turns seventeen tomorrow and does not drive. He's brilliant, taking AP physics, calculus, piano lessons (went to his recital last weekend, he played his own composition) and coding. But like all the kids in his friend group he struggles with social interactions. I have to keep pulling him out of all kinds of YouTube/Reddit/Discord rabbit holes. It is brutal. Right now I am channeling my great-grandmother. She had a rural Texas high school education. She ran a small business out of her trailer house with her daughter, my maternal grandmother. She survived three god awful marriages and was the fiercest, most independent person I have ever met. She worked the garden in her backyard and took care of her lawn herself. Sounds small and ridiculous but I was unreasonably proud of myself for cutting down the weeds in the backyard a couple of weeks ago and going to town with the clippers, destroying a bush that was blocking the sidewalk. I've been in hermit mode for years. I avoid Facebook like the plague. I'm just doing what is immediately in front of me. My life is small and sparsely populated. I prefer it that way. I keep dreaming of Mexico. There's no perfect place. But goddamn.

Darryl Price
Nov 08, 07:52pm

DP Author's Note from 2018:
They want you to falter. They want you to sit alone and be frightened in the dark. They want you to shut up and do your job. They want you to want more. But you are here and I am here and here we are. I find that incredibly beautiful. It is not life threatening--it is a great relief to me. To know that all this also means you and me...maybe we're not going to find any answers today, in our turned out heart's empty pockets, anyway--but because something still feels good, right and we smile together at the mystery of it all, I'm okay to keep going. But I like seeing your face, hearing your voice, among all the other incredible things that are happening to me and to the world right now, that' all. I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it. And I mean it. Let's not forget what we came here for.

Chris Okum
Nov 08, 08:00pm

There is nowhere to go, Misti. The bad, unspeakable thing that everyone has been thinking about and hoping wouldn't happen is actually going to happen. No one will be safe. It's just a matter of how quickly these assholes move on their plans and in what place you occupy on the order of suffering. Assuming you're white and Christian, you will be spared for a while. But you're a woman, so you are in a bit of a bind. You can either bend the knee and accept that we live in a violent, soul-suffocating theocracy, or you can join those who refuse to capitulate. I'm Jewish, so I'm going to arm myself and do what I need to do. And yes, I know I sound ridiculous to you, but if you don't understand who these people are and what they want to do then I don't know what to tell you at this point. It's been eighty years since we were forced to take on evil like this. The villains we have been reading about in history books and watching on the History Channel are back. This is not a drill. This is really happening.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 09, 02:06am

Chris, I know the value of my mind and soul so I will not capitulate. I have a Slaughterhouse-Five tattoo on my left arm. Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt. I love the scene in "Fahrenheit 451" where the woman lights the match and burns with her books. No, you don't sound ridiculous. My Jewish stepson is armed to the teeth. I shot an M16 when I was going through basic training at Fort Jackson in 1995.

"Load up on guns. Bring your friends."

So it's here. The bastards have won. But I'll go down with my boots on.

David Ackley
Nov 09, 03:04pm

" I can't go on. I'll go on."

Darryl Price
Nov 09, 04:26pm

Ah, Samuel Beckett and Kurt Vonnegut. That's as good a place as any to start.

"Any person who loves another person,
wherever in the world, is with us in this room--
even though there are battlefields." --Kenneth Patchen

David Ackley
Nov 09, 04:59pm

Here's another one for you, Daryl: " Send lawyers, guns and money, the shit has hit the fan."

Chris Okum
Nov 09, 06:28pm

Poetry, music, literature all end at the entrance of the concentration camp. And soon there will be concentration camps all over America, filled with people that MAGA wants to make suffer. I don't think people really truly understand what is about to happen. The Third Reich was a rehearsal. They did a test run in Germany in the 30s and 40s, but the show was closed down. They have made adjustments and tweaks to their brand of theater so that they can run the show again, and run it longer, and with better results. A trans-national network of the most virulent form of white supremacists are just about done in their complete take over the northern hemisphere of planet Earth. Everyone is acting like these are just more Reganites that are going to irritate us for four years and then be gone. That's not the case. Beckett only applies to those who have the freedom to go on.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/the-prophetic-vision-of-gunther-anders/14095242

David Ackley
Nov 10, 05:03pm

Like they say, let's get a grip. Trump is an old man, visibly aging rapidly. Not long from now, history will swallow him, give a mild burp, and proceed on. The movements you think you see, Chris, are partially figments of their own imaginations, the products of our fear of each other, and part of a minority of those with too much time on their hands. Most of us are forced to work for a living and don't have either the time or the inclination to make other people's lives miserable.

A number of times in my life I have had to knock on people's doors, unannounced looking for help--usually with a broken down car. On more than one occasion, the door was opened by some craggy looking customer you wouldn't want to meet in the dark anywhere, and when I went inside to use the phone, the walls would be festooned with small arms, and there might be a loaded pistol or three on a bureautop. The phone would be made available, a little small talk about my troubles ensue. Out of these encounters, would arise unexpected generosity, more help than expected or even asked for and no intent to take advantage of my vulnerability.

This is not said in naivete, I have also known malignant racists, people who threatened and occasionally carried out bodily harm and actual murderers and other assorted felons. We all carry within us multiple potentials. But inferring worldwide, historical conspiracies from the result of one American election, and some random acts of violence, risks taking your eye away from the systems that pose more threat to our collective existence than any such result.

I have to say, that I am sometimes inclined to Chris'es views. There is a certain odd solace in thinking that it will finally all come to a head in the feared for apocalypse. Depair, so final, has its appeal. But I think of the words of I think originally Adorno," It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of capitalism." But I think I prefer to try.

Chris Okum
Nov 10, 08:07pm

You're about see the end of capitalism, David, and the beginning of what comes next: techno-feudalism. The free market has proven to be too free. Dark ages with highly sophisticated weapons is where we're headed. 21st century technology wedded to 12th century ideology. History goes in circles and gathers what it needs along the way. I'm not talking about Apocalypse; I would never presume to be so important as to be living at the culmination of human history. I'm talking about something else, something worse, which is garden-variety historical ghoulishness.

David Ackley
Nov 10, 09:01pm

I guess we'll see. I'm not sure how history goes, circles, parabolas, constellations ala Benjamin? Marx's by now cliched notion: The first time as tragedy, the second as farce? Nobody's laughing now though.

Chris Okum
Nov 10, 10:05pm

The first time as tragedy, the second time as tragedy, the third time as well, and so on and so on. No one experiences their own tragedy as a farce, so I don't know what the fuck Marx was talking about.

David Ackley
Nov 11, 01:02am

He was talking about how Napoleon's buffoon of a nephew traded on his uncle's name to become emperor of France.
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