There Will Be Blood

Yes, I agree we are off course.
Yes, I agree there are problems in the country.
Yes, I've been conscious, awake, and even paying attention for the last 25 years.

Things have changed, and I too can agree that I'm not crazy about the America I'm leaving my children in when I go. Glad so many of us agree. However, I do not agree, nor do I accept that this violent trend that we're seeing is the means to a solution. I reject it. I ask everyone I know to reject it. It is a First Principle matter. Colors of flags, colors of teams, absolutely nothing in America, not the America I believe in, should require other Americans to shed another American's blood. There is a better way.

Sarah Palin started this cute trend with her iHop Hostess smile, suggesting that we target, she literally put cross hairs of a gun on maps denoting where human beings she disagreed with lived, and she published it on the worldwide web. An American mother started advocating shooting people who disagree with her!!! Symbols are meaningful. Semantic games aside.

Now many other women (I'd like to say I believe disenfranchised women, who are confused are adopting typically male strategies to solve problems. This is unnatural. I can prove it.) Now we have Sharon Angle in Utah suggesting outright that we use 2nd Amendment rights to solve our problems. Cute. She doesn't outright say let's all get our guns out, but yes, that is what she's saying. Get your guns out and shoot whomever you like that doesn't agree with you. Great!

What an American value that is!! Thanks Glen Beck. Thanks O'Reilly. Thanks Fox News. You've managed in ten years to return American to a savage nation of lunatic, poorly educated hysterics that are buying guns to solve their problems. You've deconstructed hundreds of years of social and cultural progress so that you can be on top of the 'hill' at the end of the day and raise your bloody fist in triumph over a dessimated and unrecognizable America. Meanwhile, you're stuffing your coffers with the riches you pander by inciting violence. Cool. Exactly why I've worked so hard all my life and raised my children consciously. Now we can spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how to get away from a dangerous homeland.

I am now cautious and even fearful sometimes of expressing my opinions. There is no freedom of speech with a gun pointed at you. So despite what Fox News shouts all day long in claiming they are taking America back, they are correct for other reasons.

They are taking America way back. Back to chaos, back to social upheaval, back to violence. In fact, by advocating violence to resolve their grievances they are stripping America of its very freedoms by creating an atmosphere (reminiscent of the 50's wet dream they're all having which is a decidedly delusional period in American History) where our American freedoms are destroyed. It is already gone. I can no longer comfortably put a sign or a bumper sticker on my car without fear of violent retaliation. I have cautioned my daughters not to express their opinions for fear of retribution. This is fascism. For those Americans who have reduced their intellectual capacity, one might have to go to find a book to look up the definitions and history so that they can understand that they are now the equivalent of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. But hey, if we win, we can call it whatever we want. Teflon Nation. It started with Ronald Reagan most recently. Say what you will, deny the truth, cover it with soft, pink, platitudes that are meaningless and the mindless masses will follow you right over the cliff like a lemming.

I cannot say that I've seen the blood as the Bolivian psychic saw the blood the day after Bush was elected. But I see it coming anyway. Perhaps it's a feeling. A dread. I was in my kitchen in Brooklyn the day after the election. My babysitter Fanny was there telling me about the psychic in Bolivia who was then predicting a great deal of blood world-wide during the Bush administration. She said in Spanish, "Mucho hentes muertes durante tiempo con este Presidente." Many people will die during this President's time. There will be blood.

I have that feeling today. Have had it for months now. One day I was perusing the news on the internet and came across of video of Americans protesting what a candidate for office was representing. I saw something I didn't think I'd ever see again in America. I saw an American spitting on another American. I saw an American spit on a congressman running for reelection.

I also saw an American take a gun to a church gathering of fellow Americans who were gathered to hear a Presidential candidate speak. I was appalled. We didn't learn the lessons of assasinations from the 60's. So we're regressing by 50 years. This is what it feels like now.

Of course it's legal. Is it wise? What does it say about us now? A gun in a church. This person with a gun more than likely calls himself a Christian and believes the hysterics that tell him he has a right, a God-given right, to carry his gun and shoot to protect his individualized verson of Christian reality. I went to Sunday School. I remember. Didn't ever hear anyone say or suggest that Christ (that is where the Christian title comes from, the teachings of Christ by they way for those that can't put two and two together.) ever advocated violence. Wasn't the whole idea that he died to become a martyr to stop the religious tyranny? So now we have tyrannical Christians like Glen Beck, Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnel advocating 2nd amendment solutions. Have we entered an extended version of a Fellini movie?

This man has no respect for human life. He required no gun. He wasn't in danger. There were no deer to be hunted. Here we are in a situation were there are weapon detection systems in our public schools, yet we're taking guns to church political speeches. This is insanity. The man with the gun probably has children or family that have children. What do they believe if they aren't supposed to take guns to school but it's ok to take guns to church? Mixed messages. Small wonder we have children killing other children now. People accepted it. He wasn't ostracized. People are accepting the threat of bloodshed as if there is a new fashion in town. Baggy pants, gun on your belt. Really? Have you thought this through carefully? Are you really willing to have a country with everyone packing?
I'm a mother. Have been one for over 19 years. I remember the day I stupidly realized fully that everyone is somebody's baby. I was in Manhattan, downtown, near the all the Federal Buildings. A Man started running at full speed through the afternoon crowd. Another was following him at breakneck speed with a gun drawn. I had an immediate visceral feeling, 'oh, no, I thought, someone's baby is going to get hurt, is going to die.' It felt like a genuine emergency. Hardly anyone looked. No one did anything to intervene that I could see. Like it's normal. Normal to see this.

One day I was cleaning in our loft in Manhattan. My then 3 year old daughter was seated at the breakfast bar eating. I had inadvertently left the television on. I normally allowed her only certain shows at certain times. She was a very sensitive girl. Suddenly she was yelling and crying, "Mommy, Mommy! Something terrible happened! Mommy!" I ran to her to see what it was. "What is it, baby?"
She looked up at me with tears in her eyes, "Someone died!"
I felt confusion. There was a broadcast on the news about someone's murder. My first thought was, well, so... Then I looked at her, felt her pain. Of course, she was having the normal human reaction. It is supposed to be terrible when someone dies. Isn't it?
She saw the world as seen through television as her community, her world, people she could see on the street everyday. She was so terribly upset. I realized that since I'd never let her see most of broadcast television that she had a very different concept of the world than I did. She was having the Normal, Human Reaction to another human dying. I was not having a normal reaction. I was having a conditioned reaction where I've come to accept violence as no big deal. I see it all the time.

We've been conditioned through familiarity to Violence in our lives. This conditioning has led to the inevitable. We accept violence. We have, in my humble estimation, regressed. Who would disagree and declare that more violence is better? Really? Well if more violence is bad, then less violence is good? Right. Simple logic.

Two years ago, here in Tucson, I saw a man and a woman get out of a car at a red light in the middle of the day on Oracle Road near the shopping mall. This is a 4 lane highway kind of road. Busy. Broad daylight, weekday. The older woman and the younger man walked up to the car next to mine and started beating the windshield with a bat. Glass was flying everywhere. I was boxed into the traffic at the same red light. Glass was hitting my car.
I struggled to reach the cell phone which had fallen onto the floor of the passenger side when the man with the bat walked toward me menacingly as if to say, 'Do Nothing.' Then he and the older woman grabbed the young woman who was behind the wheel of the car they'd bashed, dragged her into their car and sped off as the light changed. This happened in the length of a red light at a busy shopping mall.
I was shaken. I'd never witnessed anything this violent in the 14 years I'd lived in New York City.

The shocking thing is that no one did anything to help the young woman. There must have been 30 cars within hearing and glass shattering range. Not one person, no man, got out of their cars to assist. Has something changed fundamentally? I think so. I thought the shared, common ideal, socially and communally, was to eliminate violence in our quest as a civilization. So, I must be wrong.

We now have hours and hours of television broadcasting of hairy, sweating, mostly large male animals called human beings, wrestling to large cheering crowds. It has become a cultural pastime of great magnitude to watch this kind of thing. Racing cars, endless sports, cop shows, medical shows with a lot of violence, Reality shows that exaggerate all things to be so sensational as to meld daytime melodrama with morning talk shows like Jerry Springer. We now have as role models being broadcast to millions all day neurotic, narcissistic exhibitionists doing life-theater for the world.

Some might say we're reaching a Greek ideal, something akin to Spartacus. Not true. Read about that culture. It's more like the days of the Roman Coliseum. Blood baths, humans consciously conquering the beasts that had challenged them for centuries, emboldened by advances in culture, sending Christians and others to the beasts and watching them die. An archaic side-show. Look at how much progress we've made.

It's long been proven, over and over, that animals learn by modeling behavior. Monkeys do it. Rats do it. Birds do it. People do it. Walking, talking, eating, dressing. We learn it all the first 2 years while we silently observe the world. Our most powerful form of learning is often the visual learning.

So what is our population learning? What are they watching hours and hours of?

We are slouching into a cultural regression, getting fat, watching TV, accepting a world of pain, blood and misery as what life is supposed to be. Passive. It's all passive. We watch, learning without realizing it, we absorb the messages intended to make a profit for someone else, we believe. The system betrays us, but it is all we know. We haven't been out beyond the walls of our enslavement enough to recognize that we've been taken hostage.

Soon, it will be our own blood, or that of our neighbors. It will be sticky, sweet smelling. It will stain. You will never see that particular character on another episode in a different program. You will take faint surprise at this fact. Shrug perhaps. Oh, well. Another man down. Go to the bathroom, go back to the couch with an icy drink in your hand and grab the remote control that you think you're controlling your world with.

September 17, 2010: Notes on The Shell Game

I have to admit. There were years and years when I didn't watch television. I watch too much now, but that's a different subject. Since I've been watching a bit more television in the last 5 years I've begun to notice things I had somehow missed during the baby-raising part of my life.
Several years ago I was visiting family on the East Coast. We were having breakfast and listening to the news. A story came on about a local property owner in the Washington, D.C. area. The news was stating that American Values and liberty were under attack. Liberty to express patriotism was being undermined. A local renter had requested permission from the landlord of the building, the owner, to mount a bracket on the facade of the building in order to hang an American Flag. The news commentators were speaking in high, self-righteous volume about the undermining of American democracy. I sat listening because as it turns out, I'd recently had occasion to price the facade on my own brownstone in Brooklyn. The costs had averaged around $130,000 to do the front of the Brownstone. I thought that was a small fortune. So I had a personal interest in the story. We were seated at an antique table my mother had had in her kitchen. This home was familiar to me. I was happily eating, in my family comfort zone, while the morning proceeded.

One of my family members chimed in, 'Look at that, now. Will you look at that!' They were engaged in the broadcast. I listened more closely. Something didn't seem right to me. My family members, all two of them at the time, were getting up in arms about the subject. See, there's the evidence. One so-called American turning another away from Patriotism.

I was caught a bit off guard because I'm in the home of my family and wasn't expecting a vitriolic reaction to a news story as mundane as this was in my estimation. Then I realized something. "Steve," I said, "why the hell should the owner let anyone bang anything into their new facade?"

"Because it's America and we should be able to fly our flag!"

"Well, of course. But I'm telling you, I know from experience, I'd sure as hell say no to anyone banging anything into my new facade after I laid down $130,000 for it! The owner has rights!"

The discussion went on for several minutes at the table. I thought it was absolutely insane to even give the story credence. This is nutty stuff. Who the hell ever said a renter could demand something like that?! I've rented from and to people my entire life. It was absurd. They're allowed whatever is in the terms of their lease. Defacing the owner's property under any circumstances is usually one of the things that are routinely disallowed. No?

This is the point. The family discussion was a departure point for something that is rampant now. FOX NEWS is making a story out of hysteria. But they're missing the real story because they don't want us to think very long. If we're all worked up, defensive, fearful, under siege, we will all go into fight or flight mode. That's pretty much where America seems to be these days. Hysterical.

The fact is that in America people have a right to ask if they can hang a flag. And the other person has the right to say no if they own the property. These are fundamental democratic values. These are primary, first principles. In this particular story, the right to hang an American Flag was exaggerated. The right of the property owner to decide what someone does to their property was completely ignored. Now in the last 5 years I've seen FOX news do this over and over and over again. Distort the story to make a point. However, upon examination, most of their stories have hidden sides to them. Like this one.

Here I was, sitting in an American Family kitchen, with my American family, listening to the television talk about American rights being under attack. But I kept thinking, what about the other guy's rights? If the story were changed and the property owner wanted to hang a Gay Rights Flag on the facade of his house and the tenant objected, whose 'side' would FOX news be on? I suspect that in that instance, FOX news would be complaining about the undermining of American values again. The owner has no rights to hang the flag of his choosing nor to deny the tenant rights to hang a flag of the tenants choosing. Well, how do we make these determinations if we don't return to principles of primacy? The moral of this story that I drew was that only FOX news could determine American Values because as I saw it, they were either incredibly disingenuous or incredibly stupid and undereducated so that they have a hard time deconstructing text. A good education teaches one to think. Not to memorize. I can think. I'm a builder of things.
Anyone with a clear, discerning mind can see the conflict here.

In America we all have rights. Unless we want to change the constitution to say that only followers of FOX news have constitutional rights. Everyone else is subject to FOX NEWS CORPORATION determination of worth, value, and American pedigree.

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