Here’s another bit of political stand-up, this time with the gloves off, because big lies really are not ever helpful, and memory almost always is. And also because it’s important to recognize the seriousness of the challenges before us – life or death, no less – and humane freedom itself, always in the balance – even if it is more often taken as a mere bargaining chip, than the main stakes of the deal.
So many of the most crucial qualities of life really ain’t about what you do, but have always been dependent on “the way that you do it” – far more subtle understandings and balances – almost western Wu-wei, in a weird way – that fundamental and most oft-admired property, coolth.
You will notice that I do challenge dishonest and especially sneering propaganda head-on, but I’m doing it because of the bullying built into the lies, many just causes silenced, and victims erased – not for mere amusement or sport.
The things that bother us most, are a lot like those objects which can famously appear much larger in the side-mirror, than they actually are – but being rational is about establishing the most objective and valid ratios of importance between things and ideas around us.
Plenty of ideas that are emotionally appealing to one group of people (especially an aroused domestic political audience), cause outsize harm elsewhere – (especially to people who have long suffered great damage in silence, and were hoping they might finally be listened-to, and considered with respect).
No FB compression here – true 720/60 HZ – full-screen it, by all means
(or just listen in the background as you putter, I really do have a face for radio)
Ratios of importance are critical to all things rational (including the derivation of the word itself) – and as beautiful a domestic football as “Evil Russia” has been and remains for the American political audience – going all the way back to Kennedy versus Nixon, and Ike before him – to have to watch both the Democrats AND Republicans deliberately and actively increasing the likelihood of conflict with all their might, for no other reason than to excite their base, is absolutely grotesque.
Play the puppet-show how you must – if you must – but leave the planet-killers in the damned silos, if you please (and resist every temptation closer to that precipice as if it was, what it actually is – a very serious risk of ending everything humane and good on the planet, all at once, forever).
An incomparably ruder approach than the billion-camera instalment-plan destruction-show that we’ve all worked so hard over the last few decades to create, and then analyzed and scheduled with such wonderfully teasing and yet altogether terrifying dynamics – truly, the ultimate we-done-it.
Never can tell what freaky thing will happen next, these days – but you can be sure someone will be mad about it on your behalf – no matter what you think.
As a guy who has been actively studying and sacrificing for the environment for forty years now, the way it looks to me is – either we all of us make it, or else none of us will – and so far I’m for the team that says yes, why not at least try to survive – just as long as we can save friendship, love, loyalty, principle, sacrifice and creativity.
And if we can’t preserve our greatest gifts and strengths?
Maybe it is time to let something less destructive have a go.
Just to prove that we really meant it about fitness and fairness, all along.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
