all the many reasons it will only change when we mean it to.

 written in 2008

I always attempt to show why or at least how history shows that whether it is palestine, cuba, vietnam, old or young, rich or poor, nothing ever changes not because it's not meant to, but because its not supposed to. And, of course, thats where we come in, do we mean it to?

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Conquest, War, Famine and Death

Famine, Pestilence, War, Cruelty, Climate Change, Arrogance

There's a stretch between Mexicali and San Felipe between two small mountain ranges that is just a two- lane road with no shoulders and drop offs on each side, about twenty feet almost straight down. At the bottom of the drop off road shoulders is the occasional wreck, someone who went off and depending on the shape of the vehicle, one may be able to safely predict whether or not anyone survived. It's not far down there but depending on what wheels go over first, a rollover is almost certainly guaranteed. I've never been over this stretch of road without thinking about the fates of the previous drivers and their passengers who went over. It's about an hour out of Mexicali, there is no cell phone service, about an hour out of San Felipe, the eventual destination of the road. Help is not immediately on the way if there are any problems at all.

Before I left, my back was hurting from my usual out of the ordinary heavy work I have to do whenever I go to my Arizona straw bale cabin. I took a high dosage ibuprofen in the morning, one a couple of hours later and a third just before I crossed the border. I was feeling a little drowsy but not worse than I've felt before while driving. 

It was that stretch described above, that I've driven dozens of times before, that I fell asleep for the first time ever, drifted over to the other side, and just before I went over, I snapped awake and turned back across into my proper lane. 

Taz, my dog, never knew the difference and was asleep behind my seat. No one was behind me or approaching me. No one saw anything. I drove on but much more awake than a few seconds before.

Being more mortal that moment, i thought about what sociologists say how we're unable to deal with our own mortality we don't have actual policies that relate to those who are going to die. The reality is, politicians don’t make policy for those who are no longer useful. I can hardly wait for the likes of Sarah Palin to reach the point of no return in her own mind. Depending on how much reserve she has in that cache of sarcasm she relies on to put money in the cache, surely, she doesn’t use banks, she seems like an under the mattress kind of gal, letting her guns and Todd speak for her as to security matters. (Yes, I know, Sarah Palin in 2024 is just a memory but remember, she was part of that continuum that brought us the actual election of DT in 2016).

Well, my friends, there is a reason for this and it isn't because we're unable to deal with the idea of dying. It's because there is only one group of people who understand dying and its those who are getting closer by day to the end of their life, the terminally ill, the chronically ill, and most of all, the elderly. I say elderly most of all because they are the ones who live on, in relative health, as the end creeps slowly toward them. These moral groups are not asked about what services they need to make living in old age more compatible mainly because society doesn't want to deal with the end when it rather wants to deal in dreams and the future, not the end of life which can be excruciatingly long for those who do not do well.

There comes a time when we turn our bodies control over to the scientists from the State. If you are unfortunate enough to begin the long road of dementia, you will be kept alive no matter how long you reject the necessary, basic survival needs, such as eating and sleeping. If you are solely dependent on drugs to sustain yourself, prevent pain, and eventually, become drug dependent, which you most certainly will be, quality of life is not only diminished but is non-existent.

It's not longevity that's the issue. Women stop reproduction by the forties. 

Leftist would say that the proclivity to reproduce is worker related, thus capitalism is to blame. It's as if we were made for it. 

Life is so much more than that.

Coming down off the Grade into the Central Valley, it looks as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have already been here. I read a couple of articles the ranchers, farmers, if they can be called that, complaining they are being starved out of business by the environmentalists who have shut down the Big Pumps up in the Sacramento Delta because of salmon and small fry fish, the delta smelt. I drive past miles of empty, dusty, and barren land that I suppose is the example of what them "farmers" are talking about. This is the land the Okies came to, once upon a time when the Midwest looked like this. It's obvious those Okies who came as workers didn't all buy huge tracts of land and become the owners whereas they were the migrants back a mess of decades ago. Are these the same guys who left Oklahoma after they laid that to waste too?  Let the historians’ figure that, but it's obvious that somewhere out here lies a bigger problem than the one that big Farms want to lay at the feet of liberals and environmentalists. It's hard to believe that the water they say they aren't getting would be enough. The wind is blowing and the dirt peels off in huge clouds. Topsoil and bottom soil, looks like to me. Why is it that when it comes to socialism, the rich money boys want everyone to share what they don't have but need, in this case, water, but when it comes to them looking at the way they've made a lot of money with wasteful and destructive growing. These are the same folks who, over in Delano, didn't want to pay migrant workers shit or want to provide decent working conditions. Another group of liberals. What little I know about growing, just looking around here, seems to verify what I do know, that people since time immemorial have stripped the earth in every way imaginable, sometimes to eke out a living and sometimes to just take what they can.

There are big environmental problems. Water is one of the biggest. It's never been equally distributed around the globe, either too much, too little. What's wrong though isn't the unequal distribution but the inegalitarian way in which, not only water, but food and resources are shared throughout the globe. 

The problem is, it isn't shared. It's all about ownership. It's all about Human profit. Give the water to the Big Water Farms of Kern County and within a few years, especially if drought doesn't change, salmon and small fry fish will disappear, along with all the fish and fowl that rely on them, in addition, the farms themselves we be desolate because when time marches on without water, it’s like heading out across the Mojave relying on luck and God to keep you fed and watered. It's more than just about us.

We, meaning all of us, rich and poor have to make the adjustment. If we let Big Ag make all the decisions, we'll end up resource poor and environmentally destitute. We'll have barren land and NO salmon or small fry fish.

 

Reality vs TV

We live in a world of make believe. Religion and the false promise of security.

 God or the nation state relieve us from our responsibility. to control ourselves.

 Even though most of us would never kill, even under dire circumstances or only by accident defending our real selves and not the mental state we create around us like a security blanket, a real boundary.

If we look at TV listings, we see that there is a creativity by writers to provide us just enough "reality" to believe that even if the world isn't that perfect it could be under the right fantasy,

Men and women work together to rid the highly creative and deceptive serial killers or "human monstrosity" which, according to somebody, may actually exist. Very similar to the "terrorists" that we believe who will, if not now, someday look for the reason to harm us even though we are thousands of miles away.

We forget that in the last century, which is the century that most of us lived in longer than this one, the most horrible conflicts on earth were created by the workings of western civilization, and in fact, since those horrible conflicts, what's come after, is not the logical outcome of those conflicts but the created, man- made illusion of trying to make sure those conflicts never happen again, yet they continue to prepare for the next one.

It well might be that those conflicts never happen again because now we seem to have "progressed" to the point that the next one will be less western oriented and origin based because white western philosophy now seems to have focused on the brown, non- Christian populations that western societies have dominated and controlled for centuries. 

The overthrow of apartheid in South Africa and the rise of non- Christian based, conservative philosophies and practices makes our examples, such as Cuba and Venezuela, in our hemisphere small meat and potatoes seem even more lean indeed.

Yet we, as a nation state, continue to try and hold everything together like a giant glue made from weapons and preposterous notions of world economics, economies based in the very system that created the worst conflicts of the last century.

I guess they believe they have it all under control now.

Ebola is a good example of our ignorance of how ideologies and diseases spread. We're so ignorant that our policies almost demand total compliance(meaning understanding) to principals that were outdated a long time ago. We've given ourselves free rein- a cowboy term- demonstrating that a horse, like any natural animal will wander away if left to their own devices. And that's where we are today.

We've wandered away from our basic principles which were never that strong within us anyway. We don't have the democracy in us because we've let corporations run the supposed free political cycle. In this case, the word “free"

is a misnomer. We no longer have a coherent foreign policy

because we've let the military commandeer all our strategies for change be up to weapons and corporate profit policies. "Intelligence" in this case is another misnomer. 

Where TV comes into it is the maintenance of our institutional structures through our imagination doesn't bother filling in real facts with anything we see.

Everything runs smoothly in the TV world and when it doesn't because we have to have some tension or conflict, right, then the resolution is at least promising in reflecting our core values. "Core values" is also a misnomer here.

 

Cuba, Another reason why I won't vote for anybody's ticket.

Being an anarchist, allows me to run in the middle of the two disparate philosophies regarding Cuba. The dominant US policy

of sanctions and isolation of Cuba always weighs in at being the most unforgiving and perfect example of the way US foreign policy works. The US policy in Cuba has been passed down from president to president, from generation to generation for so long most people no longer understand or even have any knowledge of why we continue to sanction Cuba. It's almost as if it is in the constitution. There are two basic reasons, one, the Florida Cuban exile community holds Florida politics and  maybe even more so, national electoral politics in its fist and the other reason as stated by many of our politicians, The Castro brothers were dictators, as if these dictators were different than any other dictators we have not only supported but actually brought to power through our own dictatorial methods such as election manipulation, assassination, or military coup. So, even if we use reason to try and determine this policy, reason, our great white forefather engendered philosophy doesn't pan out. Basically, it is a military decision based on the premise of why give up control once you got control? This philosophy is more understandable to the patriot and the politician and is the culture upon which our foreign policy originates.

Never give back what you’ve taken by force or control by domination.

On the other side of the coin on which I stand there is the fact that Cuba is politically speaking, a communist/socialist country and possibly has evolved into an autocratic state, when it comes down to decision making. To tell you the truth, not being Cuban and having only visited there several times, I cannot really say how their political system works. I am familiar with the medical side of Cuban politics and what I see there seems genuinely progressive.

But I come not to praise Cuba but to bury the USA. 

I will not vote for anybody in the two-party system. I made this vow a while ago. I don't believe things have gotten better, in fact, social/political policy in the US has gotten worse for most of the people, here and worldwide, and we can hold the policies of the US Government responsible for much of what is happening in the world today. World leaders can have all the photo ops shaking hands with the devil but it doesn't have anything to do with the whitewash we are being inundated with by the media, etc.

When I made that vow, I used Cuba policy as my guideline. If our system of determining presidents cannot produce one that can shift the future course of America in any way whatsoever, then why vote? If the election of Obama and the real possibility of Hilary being elected president based on her weak and corrupted views but asserting that if elected having first a black president and then a woman president reinvents the American myth of "anyone can be president", it's something we already knew when the unique and stupidly arrogant George Bush was elected. Obama has reproved what Bill Clinton already proved

and that is popular culture presidents, like Hillary will be, just goes to show you what a black hole America has turned into.

So, my next president will not be a military president nor will it be "I am the world leader" president and not the "but you have to make me do it, and if you don't then it's your fault" president. 

I'm telling you all, none of what we have is worth what the future looks like we're making it become.

Give Guatanamo back to the Cubans and let them expand their International medical school to rid that navy base of its bad juju, lift the sanctions so they can try to make progress and we can see if the grand experiment works out.

I know that's like asking the devil who wears the stars on his shoulder to step away from his madness for the sake of humanity. But asking is the only polite way before making revolution.

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