The American Culture of Guns and Fear

  Gun laws work, all you have to do is google Australia to find a shining example (the assault rifle ban worked here for years too with the exception of Columbine), but now the NRA is going to tell us that even though it might have worked 'over there' you'll have to pry my gun out of my cold dead hands to take it from me. I ain't gonna give up my guns. Why in Virginia these days I can even pack heat at the local diner. That's The 2nd Amendment my boy. That's what America is all about. Guns and Fear. Arm the schools. Arm the churches. Arm the parking lots. There will come a time when The Guys in the Black Hats show up with their guns and The Guys in the White Hats better be carrying their pieces too. All very Cowboy and Indian. All very very  Bad Karma.
   There's going to be a lot of Fear and Loathing in the carnival of our political discourse in the coming days and it's going to last more than one or two news cycles. There's a lot of people fed up with guns and the killing, and there's a lot of people paralyzed by that fear and dependent on their guns. Things are going to get real nasty, because we as a nation have more guns than the rest of the world, and we're good at killing each other with them.
   This is going to be just another 'litmous test' of  our American Character. We'll watch the pundits, politicians, and talking heads as we remember the twenty dead 6 year olds.........all this dialogue destined to make the sane sick at heart. And there will be questions........
   Will we expand our mental health programs to the Pre-Gipper Years and beyond? Will the CDC take up gun violence as a health issue like they did car accidents? Will owning guns be regulated like owning cars? Will assault weapons be banned again? Will any of this stop the killing? Not only the fame of mass murder, but the ignominious everyday run of the mill murders we see on the news everyday? Will our sense of community embrace our outcasts so that they would not attack us? Not in the America I know......
   Wars of aggression, torture, drone killings, predatory financial practices, domestic spying: we live in a Kingdom of Corporate Whores, shills for the military-industrial-congressional complex, and we spread death better than the proverbial Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse. All you got to do is watch. It's on your television set everyday, but whomever speaks in favor of guns will do so with a backdrop of 20 dead children's faces.

  
  
    

Democracy versus Capitalism

   Another school shooting. Another American Mass Murder, graded on the amount of indifference and carnage, weighed in upon the scales of fame, and now, the POTUS says that this is unacceptable and we must change. Change what? Gun laws? Mental health programs? The fabric of American community? How deep must the change go for such atrocities to end?
  When democracy finally realizes that capitalism has no values, with the exception of the more, and that our capitalist culture is what denigrates our personal relationships, and the fabric of community, maybe that would be a start of some real change. These days it seems as if all the functions of capitalism, of management itself,  have turned on American society. The financial crisis of 2008. Shipping manufacturing jobs overseas. Capitalism seems to value labor only as a commodity and fails to realize that consumers and employees are essentially human beings, much more than functions and commodities. Americans are citizens, and it's democracy that allows every corporation the right  to exist. Democracy has the ability to pull the plug on any capitalist venture, but our representative government has been bought wholesale by capitalism, ruled by their narrow interests, all covertly administered by corporate lobbyists. Even banning assault weapons is a law we passed that was washed under the bridge.
   Change? Our society is based on competition, individual relationships of mutual usage, all based on greed, on wealth, on fame, and such a social compact has it's very foundation resting upon such violence. No wall streeter went to jail. George Bush is a war criminal and nothing at all happened to him. We started this country on the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of other races. We're the only country to drop atomic weapons on another people. We have a deep history of violence. We're even killing other peoples children with drones, but these days Corporate America not only feeds on the other nations of the world, but on it's own people. Violence seems to be 'the flowering' of who we are. To change that demands more than outlawing assault weapons, requiring background checks, and upping the scope of community health services. Such change requires a change in the way we see ourselves, a change in the way we live.
   You have to find this out for yourself, for there are no political or religious answers. All the people of the world are more than employees, more than consumers, more than accumulated wealth, more than fame, even more than citizens. What are we? We all have but a short time upon this earth to ask these questions, made even shorter by corporate environmental degradation and poisoning: what we call Global Warming. What is the answer?
  

~~~Success Implies Brutality~~~

   Our stomachs demand that we kill to survive~~~as this Remington painting Hungry Moon reveals. It's a sorrowful part of living within the violence of space-time, as the second law of thermodynamics applies to all systems. It is the way it is. All things must pass~~~they are temporary~~~and~~~death is at the end of everything. But in our temporal existence here on earth where all in the end is impermanent~~~do we have to be so ruthless in our accumulations? Do we not see ourselves in our fellow man? Can we not take what we need and leave the rest? Hunter gatherers like the American Indians above were much more sane than my fellowman these days~~~for thought and mankind's inventions~~~have brutalized us more than we can imagine. Some tribes of Indians had no word for~~~sacred~~~for everything was sacred to them. The culture that I grew up in looked at everything as an object~~~to be acquired~~~and used. Is everything living~~~or dead? Krishnamurti put it this way~~~the essence of control is suppression. We suppress the life in ourselves and in others~~~all to try and hold on to what by nature is impermanent. Much dark humor in this. Fragmentation is insanity. Thought is destroying the planet. And we think of The Indian Lifestyle as savage.

~~~A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand~~~

"House Divided" Speech by Abraham Lincoln


   Does today's Class War compare to The Civil War? Will there ever rise such a man as this to appeal to~~~The Better Angels of Our Nature~~~or will politicians forever more be bought and sold by the powers that be? How does the denial of personal freedom compare to the social denegration that springs from~~~economic and environmental destruction? Who can live peaceably together with slaveholders~~~or~~~corporate entities that have no social responsibilities? Is democracy for All The People~~~or~~~is it a Tattered Quilt of states rights? Was it really~~~North vs South? Is it really~~~Democratic America vs Corporate America? Blue vs Grey~~~or~~~Red vs Blue? Today there are Two Americas~~~the haves~~~and the have nots~~~and i don't believe we'll ever be blessed with a man such as this~~~to unite our house divided.

~~~~~The Birth of Politics~~~~~

Kinfonet Quote of the Day: We are always caught in this misery of an everlasting battle with ourselves and with society. That is a fact.

~~~The Fate of Global Capitalism~~~

Kinfonet Quote of the Day: The present civilization is based on greed and individual competition; it cannot last forever, because it has no intrinsic value.

~~~~~America's Big Problem~~~~~

Kinfonet Quote of the Day: Why do you cling to the ideal of freedom when you are in a prison?