Prez Donald trump has claimed that he will have to pay more under his tax plan. Of course, this is a lie. He will personally gain millions and millions each year. When he dies, his heirs will make millions more due to a cut in the estate tax. While incentivizing his death may be one of the better ideas in the Republican tax plan, the long-term net effect will be the largest transfer of wealth ever from the bottom 60% of Americans to the top 1%. So, as a tribute to this fiasco, I have created the first free poster in what may unfortunately be a series, “Make Me Eat Again,” parodying Trump’s faux working class heroism and feigned self-sacrifice: Trump’s Tax Cut Cut – 15 million dollars each year, just like yours – MAKE ME EAT AGAIN.
MUSE POEM: Awe Mused Up
At the end of the day
He was awe mused up
Know longer able
Too take it
Sow well
This poem was written amidst a streak of short poems when the muse struck. Sometimes the muse needs to be addressed directly as a subject. The glorious work as a scribe to a muse is only work in as much as handing off the words become incarnate into human language requires time and some small sacrifice of an alternative activity, say, sleep. The muse’s musings are worthy of a voice, and even sometimes beyond a voice in my head. May you on occasion find yourself in good service to a muse.
HAPPINESS: Hedonic Happiness Versus Meaningful Happiness
I have long been interested in happiness and happiness research. I recently stumbled across one of the most fascinating scientific articles of any kind that I have read in recent years: Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life. This happiness research focused on the crucial differences between happiness attributed simply to one’s pleasurable experiences — hedonic happiness — and happiness attributable to experiencing meaning in life.
This particular happiness research peaked my interest because I have been accused of arrogance or hubris in claiming that some people with high levels of happiness may be missing out on substantial aspects or portions of happiness. My alleged “second guessing” of peoples’ subjective state is substantially confirmed by this groundbreaking happiness research.
From the authors’ abstract:
“Satisfying one’s needs and wants increased happiness but was largely irrelevant to meaningfulness. Happiness was largely present-oriented, whereas meaningfulness involves integrating past, present, and future. For example, thinking about future and past was associated with high meaningfulness but low happiness. Happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker. Higher levels of worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness.”
The pleasure of satisfying needs and wants (hedonic happiness) has little to do with leading a meaningful life. Plus, worry, stress, and anxiety are linked to higher meaningfulness and lower (hedonic) happiness. The developmental tasks of integrating meaning into and across one’s life can be stress-inducing. Fortunately, to cut to the chase, leading a meaningful life contributes substantially to a happy life, often accounting for losses in hedonic happiness. Though the stress of leading a very difficult but meaningful life may result in lower overall level of happiness. From my perspective, risking or sacrificing hedonic pleasures for a life of increased meanings strikes me as, well…meaning full.
From the introduction:
“The wishes for happiness and for a meaningful life are two of the most widely held goals by which people measure and motivate themselves. A breathtakingly broad variety of other common goals and strivings — as examples, the desires to be healthy, to be loved, to succeed at work, to raise children, to serve one’s religion or country — can be subsumed under either or both of those broad wishes. The present article addresses the relationship between the two. Although undoubtedly happiness and a meaningful life have substantial overlap, our focus is on the differences. More precisely, we shall develop theory and provide data about what factors differentially predict happiness and meaningfulness.
Positive psychology took off in the 1990s as a corrective to psychology’s heavy emphasis on illness, suffering, and misfortune. It sought to enrich human life and enhance human functioning. The study of happiness has received a tremendous boost from the advent of positive psychology. Research on what makes life meaningful has increased as well, but perhaps not nearly as much. This special issue of the journal may be a useful corrective in that it undertakes to call the attention of positive psychologists (and other interested researchers) to issues of meaning and meaningfulness. The present investigation was intended partly to clarify some key differences between happiness and meaningfulness.
We shall argue that although happiness and meaning are important features of a desirable life and indeed are interrelated, they have different roots and implications (MacGregor & Little, 1998). Happiness may be rooted in having one’s needs and desires satisfied, including being largely free from unpleasant events. Meaningfulness may be considerably more complex than happiness, because it requires interpretive construction of circumstances across time according to abstract values and other culturally mediated ideas.”
I deeply appreciate an integrated middle ground between the all-too-frequent pathologizing in modern psychology and a common superficial view in both research and everyday life of happiness as in essence simply pleasant emotional states. This research seems to get at the heart of integrating our understanding of the interplay between “positive” emotional experience and the genuinely difficult search for experiencing meaning amidst the hardness in life. Such an understanding seems critical to a more holistic view of happiness, fuller of our best shot at living amidst ultimate realities (objective realities?) than the surreal view of happiness potentially, perhaps even ideally, disconnected from and unmediated by objective reality, i.e., happiness as a purely subjective state.
In defining happiness:
“Happiness is generally defined as subjective well-being, which is to say, an experiential state that contains a globally positive affective tone. It may be narrowly or broadly focused: A person may claim to be happy to have found a lost shoe, happy that the war is over, or happy to be having a good life. Researchers have conceptualized and measured happiness in at least two quite different ways. One is affect balance, indicating having more pleasant than unpleasant emotional states, and is thus essentially an aggregate of how one feels at different moments. The other, life satisfaction, goes beyond momentary feelings to invoke an integrative, evaluative assessment of one’s life as a whole.
Meaning can be a purely symbolic or linguistic reality, as in the meaning of a word. The question of life’s meaning thus applies symbolic ideas to a biological reality. Meaningfulness is presumably both a cognitive and an emotional assessment of whether one’s life has purpose and value. People may feel that life is meaningful if they find it consistently rewarding in some way, even if they cannot articulate just what it all means. Our focus is on meaningfulness and the meaning of life.
Operationally, we let participants in our studies define happiness and a meaningful life in whatever way they chose, rather than imposing specific definitions on them. We also assumed (and found) that the two overlap substantially…In particular, it should be possible to have a highly meaningful life that is not necessarily a happy one (e.g., as religious missionary, political activist, or terrorist).”
These researchers anchor their theory of happiness to the idea that happiness is natural and meaning is cultural. Of course, these two constructs overlap and interrelate. How they are related was the purpose of their research.
“We assume the simpler form of happiness (i.e., affect balance rather than life satisfaction), at least, is rooted in nature. All living creatures have biological needs, which consist of things they must obtain from their environment in order to survive and reproduce. Among creatures with brains and central nervous systems, these basic motivations impel them to pursue and enjoy those needed things, and the satisfaction of those needs generally produces positive feeling states. Conversely, negative feelings arise when those needs are thwarted. Hence affect balance depends to some degree on whether basic needs are being satisfied. Possibly life satisfaction too could be swayed by whether, in general, one is getting the things one wants and needs. Human beings are animals, and their global happiness therefore may depend on whether they generally get what they want and need.
If happiness is natural, meaningfulness may depend on culture. All known cultures use language, which enables them to use meanings and communicate them. There is a large set of concepts underlying language, and these concepts are embedded in interconnected networks of meaning. These are built up over many generations, and each new person comes to learn most of these meanings from the group. Appraising the meaningfulness of one’s life thus uses culturally transmitted symbols (via language) to evaluate one’s life in relation to purposes, values, and other meanings that also are mostly learned from the culture. Meaning is thus more linked to one’s cultural identity than is happiness.
Although this special issue is devoted to “personal meaning,” meaning itself is not personal but rather cultural. It is like a large map or web, gradually filled in by the cooperative work of countless generations. An individual’s meaningfulness may be a personally relevant section of that giant, culturally created and culturally transmitted map.
One crucial advantage of meaning is that it is not limited to the immediately present stimulus environment. Meaningful thought allows people to think about past, future, and spatially distant realities (and indeed even possibilities). Related to that, meaning can integrate events across time. Purpose, one important component of meaningfulness, entails that present events draw meaning from future ones. The examples listed above of meaningful but not happy lives (e.g., oppressed political activist) all involve working toward some future goal or outcome, such that the future outcome is highly desirable even though the present activities may be unpleasant. Meaningfulness may therefore often involve understanding one’s life beyond the here and now, integrating future and past. In contrast, happiness, as a subjective feeling state, exists essentially in the present moment. At most, happiness in the form of life satisfaction may integrate some degree of the past into the present — but even so, it evaluates the past from the point of view of the present. Most people would probably not report high life satisfaction on the basis of having had a good past but while being currently miserable.
Consistent with that view that meaning integrates across time, Vallacher and Wegner (1985, 1987) found that higher levels of meaning were consistently marked by longer time frames. As people shifted toward more concrete and less meaningful ways of thinking about their actions, they became more focused on the here and now. Thus, a wedding can be described both as “making a lifelong commitment to love” and as “saying some words in a church.” The former invokes a longer time span and is more meaningful than the latter.
Indeed, Baumeister (1991) observed that life is in constant change but strives for stability, and meaning is an important tool for imposing stability on the flux of life. For example, the feelings and behaviors that two mates have toward each other will fluctuate from day to day, sometimes even momentarily, but culturally mandated meanings such as marriage define the relationship as something constant and stable. (And marriage does in fact help to stabilize relationships, such as by making it more difficult for the partners to dissolve the relationship.) Such ongoing involvements undoubtedly contribute to the degree of meaningfulness a life has. Put another way, the pursuit of goals and fulfillments through ongoing involvements and activities that are interlinked but spread across time may be central to meaningfulness.
Again, we assume there is substantial overlap between meaningfulness and happiness. Humans are social beings, and participation in social groups is a vital means by which people satisfy their basic needs in order to survive and reproduce. Hence interpersonal involvement, among other things, is surely vital for both meaning and happiness. We do not intend to dwell on such things as interpersonal belongingness, because our focus is on the differences between meaningfulness and happiness, but we acknowledge their importance. Although both happiness and meaningfulness may involve interpersonal connection, they may differ in how one relates to others. Insofar as happiness is about having one’s needs satisfied, interpersonal involvements that benefit the self should improve happiness. In contrast, meaningfulness may come instead from making positive contributions to other people.
Although needs can be satisfied in a selfish fashion, the expression and development of selfhood tends to invoke symbolic relations and is therefore more a matter of meaning than happiness. MacGregor and Little (1998) found that the meaningfulness of individuals’ personal projects depended on how consistent they were with core aspects of self and identity. Many animals have the same basic needs as humans, but the human self is far more elaborate and complex than what other animals exhibit. Part of the reason is that the human self is created and structured on the basis of the cultural system (see Baumeister, 2011). On that basis, we predicted that selfhood would have different relationships to happiness and meaningfulness. Happiness would mainly be linked to whether the self’s needs are being satisfied. Meaningfulness would be far more broadly related to what activities express and reflect the symbolic self, some of which would involve contributing to the welfare of others (individually or in general) or other culturally valued activities.”
In more simple term, culture is what separates humans from other animals. Much pre-existing happiness research focused too closely on the animal (natural) aspects of humans and not adequately accounting for meaning (cultural) aspects. I can’t help but notice that modern science, with its mechanistic models, often leaves the heart and soul — meaning — of humanity unasccounted for, and therefore devalued.
To conclude and integrate these happiness researchers’ findings:
“Meaningfulness and happiness are positively correlated, so they have much in common. Many factors, such as feeling connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored contribute similarly to both. Yet the two are distinct, and the focus of this investigation has been to identify the major differences in correlates of happiness (corrected for meaning) and meaningfulness (corrected for happiness). Correcting highly correlated variables for each other can reverse effects, which may contribute to some inconsistency in the literature. Future research should distinguish happiness from meaningfulness, because many ostensible contributors to happiness are in fact mainly associated with meaning and have little or no direct contribution to happiness except by way of increasing meaning. For example, helping others may actually increase happiness because it increases meaningfulness, which in turn contributes to happiness, but when we corrected for the effect on meaningfulness, the pure effect of helping others was if anything the opposite: a reduced level of happiness.
Our findings suggest that happiness is mainly about getting what one wants and needs, including from other people or even just by using money. In contrast, meaningfulness was linked to doing things that express and reflect the self, and in particular to doing positive things for others. Meaningful involvements increase one’s stress, worries, arguments, and anxiety, which reduce happiness. (Spending money to get things went with happiness, but managing money was linked to meaningfulness.) Happiness went with being a taker more than a giver, while meaningfulness was associated with being a giver more than a taker. Whereas happiness was focused on feeling good in the present, meaningfulness integrated past, present, and future, and it sometimes meant feeling bad. Past misfortunes reduce present happiness, but they are linked to higher meaningfulness — perhaps because people cope with them by finding meaning.
The Highly Meaningful But Unhappy Life
Our data enable us to construct a statistical portrait of a life that is highly meaningful but relatively low in happiness, which illuminates the differences between happiness and meaningfulness. This sort of life has received relatively little attention and even less respect. But people who sacrifice their personal pleasures in order to participate constructively in society may make substantial contributions. Cultivating and encouraging such people despite their unhappiness could be a goal worthy of positive psychology.
Our findings depict the unhappy but meaningful life as seriously involved in difficult undertakings. It was marked by ample worry, stress, argument, and anxiety. People with such lives spend much time thinking about past and future: They expect to do a lot of deep thinking, they imagine future events, and they reflect on past struggles and challenges. They perceive themselves as having had more unpleasant experiences than others, and in fact 3% of having a meaningful life was due to having had bad things happen to you.
Although these individuals may be relatively unhappy, several signs suggest they could make positive contributions to society. High meaningfulness despite low happiness was associated with being a giver rather than a taker. These people were likely to say that taking care of children reflected them, as did buying gifts for others. Such people may self-regulate well, as indicated by their reflecting on past struggles and imagining the future, and also in their tendency to reward themselves.
One can also use our findings to depict the highly happy but relatively meaningless life. People with such lives seem rather carefree, lacking in worries and anxieties. If they argue, they do not feel that arguing reflects them. Interpersonally, they are takers rather than givers, and they give little thought to past and future. These patterns suggest that happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desires are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided.”
I am so delighted, even happy, that I stumbled across this happiness research. May the deepest harmonies of nature and human culture conspire to bring about profound happiness for us all.
COMEDIAN JESUS: Pax Romana — You’re Killing Me!
This Comedian Jesus political cartoon highlights the shallow liberalism and false choices of Pax Romana, the metaphorical stand-in for Pax Americana, peace through so-called enlightened domination.
This Comedian Jesus cartoon also ties the all-too-convenient collaboration of political and religious elites in the less-than-enlightened shared interest of self-preservation and the status quo. Prophets, making radical calls for accountability, and modeling self-sacrifice, make the powers that be grate agin and agin. Many American Christians oddly reframe Jesus execution as simply some sort of metaphysical accounting adjustment, minimizing his direct challenge to political and religious elites. Jesus was a threat to Roman political rule, brutally enforced by military rule in its extended territories, the colonies of the age. Racism, xenophobia, and straightforward domination was part and parcel to the Roman order, cynically referred to as Pax Romana. Jesus’ creative nonviolence suited the oppressed Jews (and others) with amor of hope, and provided bold tools to disarm Roman rule.
Jesus was a threat to religious elites due to his profound challenges to the authority and legitimacy of religious elites and his surging popularity. Also, Jesus was seen as indirectly stoking the possibilities of a violent insurrection (Judas, from the Zealots who believed in violent insurrection, may have betrayed Jesus in hopes that his martyrdom would trigger revolutionary actions among the populace). The religious elites had much to lose as their collaboration with the occupying Roman powers had bought them special privileges, a classic technique of dominating powers to buy so-called peace, in this case the brutal-for-most Pax Romana.
Pilate, in questioning Jesus employs another classic technique of ultimately evading accountability with his infamous “What is truth?” interrogative. This now infamous questioning, would eventually become an iconic emblem of what is now central to postmodern thought: the relativity of truth. For the worse, such an easy liberalism provides great smokescreens for the powers that be to evade accountability with feigned intellectual and ideological credence. The modern day Roman empire of Western civilization has assured full employment of this shallow liberalism. This Comedian Jesus political cartoon parodies this with the brutal liberality of getting to choose your method of death, the too-close-too-home reality for millions under Pax Americana.
To bring all of this home in contemporary fashion, the choice of Roman/American citizens choosing which shade of empire they want to enrich its citizenry, casts a long shadow, and essentially false choice from the perspective of those not benefiting from Roman/American citizenship.
While the votes of citizens are bought with many denominations, and presented in contrasting shades of liberality, the church of American privilege is built on a foundation of military might and awe that money can buy. For those whose world is colonized by America, or who live and die as nominal citizens relegated to apartheid-like ghettos, the so-called choice of their brand of ruler remains of profoundly grate consequence.
Planetary citizens are hoping for prophets over profits.
Mother Earth is quiet udderly sweating this election. I witness the desperate fighting for our own scraps of privilege as sadly pathetic in the light of America’s finest ideals. May we rise up in another American revolution, this time for the benefit all God’s children and beauteous creation.
Feel free to browse more of Top Pun’s anti-imperialism designs designed to end global domination.
POEM: Commander-in-chief
Just
Say it
Three times fast
He/she/it
Commander-in-chief
Presiding over
No unwounded soldiers
As sum kind
Of used scars salesman
Master of what we auto do
Protector of awe we car about
As if
Some amored vehicle
Good grief
Shock and all
Giving won’s right harm
As pumped up append age
And sport scar
As buy gone youth
The fodder of proclamations
And canonizing
A bout
How offal sorry
Know longer jumping
Through hooplas
Green to pain for grave deeds
As herein now
Head stoned
Or even
Missing inaction
That piece that passes
Awe
Under standing
An immeasurable ruler
Of the highest
Nay heavenly
Rank
Owed to the Commander-in-chief. He/she/it. Weather a man, a woman, or merely a cog in the office of the President, war is hell. All else is propaganda. The commander-in-chief serves as the high priest of nationalism, offering up blood and idol words, mocking the sovereign goodness of God. Selling evil as necessary is affront enough to a loving God.
Overselling military service as a sacred duty cements our feat in an ocean of hurt. Trust in the power of war, military might, is the fodder of much of the Old Testament. This is nothing new. However, the power and workings of God are ever anew. There was a time when people believed that he earth was flat. There was a time when people believed that monarchy, the rule of royal elites, was an absolute and unchangeable reality.
There was a time when people accepted slavery as a normal, desirable, even God-sanctioned, fact of life. God created us free. Free to do evil. Free to do good. We don’t need to kill to be free. We may need to kill to mold creation into our image, of a world free for those closest to us, and a world of shit for those far from us. We worship a god chopped up into little peaces, and we have the body parts to prove it. May we cast off the vicious cycles of violence and war, and dedicate, even sacrifice, our lives for a world where one side fits all. This is awe that God asks of US. Make it sow.
Browse all of Top Pun’s anti-war button designs and peace button designs.
POEM: Forging Another Plan It
Politics
Is just
Another plan it
Plutocracy
The best
Money can bye
This short poem is about money in politics, the ultimate manifestation of which is plutocracy. When money is king, you can say good buy to democracy. Do you feel like you are living on some different planet: planet Plutocracy? The plan it is from rich folks, the 1%.
You can call it oligarchy, kleptocracy, or corporatacracy, but, in our synonym-spiced political system, money trumps people, and corporate persons trump human persons. There is little comfort in having the best political system that money can buy. As presidential election season rolls around, the aristocracy steamrolls what’s left of democracy in a rigged system, offering only the illusion of choice. This bankrupt system, not surprisingly, produces a billionaire megalomaniac where authoritarianism is the default and all of our problems are somebody else’s fault, and a Wall Street abettor with imperial ambitions.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, represent the surreal diversity of aristocrats. Señor Trump will build a wall and the Mexicans will pay for it — because they love him! Commander-in-chief Hillary Clinton will put the finishing touches on the Death Star by providing its minions and minionettes paid maternity leave and affordable debt sentences. I’m sure the winner will be whichever cult can round up and sacrifice the most chickens running around with their heads cut off. As for me, I’m going to vote for the candidate favored by our great, great, great, grandchildren.
POEM: Present Daze
God invented the eight hour day
But buy popular demand
Parently beyond what could ever be yearned
The ardor one tries
Only leaves won
With more or less
Wanting more our
In their daze
With each re-quest
First off with nine hours
Fallowed by ten
Bye and bye 11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
And sow on and sow on
Till 24
As sum backward count
Down with freedom
Until divine enough
As full, filled with presents
This poem is a bit of storytelling regarding hour ever-present knead for more time in our daze. God is portrayed as a permissive parent granting immature children the never-enough request for more hours in the day. This poem is an object lesson about “divine enough,” where both God and humans have to set boundaries and limits to move from merely an adequate quantity of time to a full, filling quality of time. The freedom we seek requires adequate time but can only be “enough” when we learn to experience a sufficient quality of time. This is the transcendent freedom emanating from mastery of experiencing the “eternal now.” Of course, humans need a certain amount of time suitable to their nature and the tasks before them. This poem plays with the notion that this amount of time may be somewhat arbitrary — a storytelling device to accentuate the governing importance of the quality of time — but humans were made, evolved befitting to a 24-hour day. And of note, in our weakly existence, God instituted a Sabbath day to set apart the wrest. Rest and re-creation are as integral to life as any work set before us. This poem first imagines God as creating an eight hour day. This is not arbitrary. The eight hour day alludes to the successful workers’ movement in response to nearly unimaginably exhausting work schedules: “In 1890, when the government first tracked workers’ hours, the average workweek for full-time manufacturing employees was 100 hours and 102 hours for building tradesmen.”
The eight hour movement’s slogan was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will.” This movement was deeply rooted in the hard work and sacrifice — boundary setting — necessary to respect our human nature and human rights. The defining moment in this movement, the birth-pangs of American labor, were police killings of strikers:
“On the evening of May 4, 1886, thousands of workers gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest against the police killing of six strikers that had taken place a day earlier. As the rally wound down, a bomb exploded among a phalanx of policemen who had moved in to disperse the crowd. In the ensuing melee, seven policemen and an unknown number of civilians died.
The ‘Haymarket riot’ triggered the first American red scare. Media reporting was one-sided and vitriolic. Even though most casualties resulted from policemen’s bullets, the event was used to condemn the labor movement and its cause. Authorities quickly moved to pin blame for the event on Chicago’s working class anarchist leaders, who were arrested, tried, and convicted in a case that made a mockery of jurisprudence.
After the trial, an international campaign was waged for reversal of the death sentences, led by literary figure William Dean Howells, a close friend of Mark Twain. Of the eight defendants, four were hung on “Black Friday,” November 11, 1887: Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer and George Engel.
Haymarket is of enormous historical significance. It was the bloody culmination of the eight-hour-day movement, which had mobilized hundreds of thousands of American workers. And it was the direct origin of May 1 as the international holiday of the working class—celebrated virtually everywhere but in the land of its inspiration, the US.”
The trinity of work, leisure and sleep may be rooted in our human nature, yet there are many who would rob us of such a birthright. The struggle continues in our culture of busyness and work/money as the alleged determiners of our identity and worth. May we find a more balanced way, in harmony with our nature. And in each moment, may you “divine enough/As full, filled with presents.”
POEM: Wee Civil Lies: They Brutalize
We are prone
Too civil lies
The most savage saving
Buy brutal lies
As assuredly
As they had
Been stood up
Just the same
For their own
Good
Won morality for us
None for them
Hidden as mirror
Human eyes
Unsettling
The score
One love
This poem is about the violence we unleash in the name of the state and nationalism against stateless violence that is often referred to as terrorism. War is terrorism with a bigger budget. War on terrorism is a shock and awe full escalation of violence seeking to end violence with more violence. This poem is about the profound egocentrism that is scaled up to nationalism and exclusivist patriotism. When we add our ignorance of “foreign” humans to the crucible of our own fears, we conjure demons. A nation of partisans is blind to humanity.
We prefer to believe that humans living in other nations and cultures somehow operate disconnected, even psychotically, from a cause-and-effect world. “They” are aliens, or more literally, not human. Their grievous experiences are viewed as illegitimate, or simply self-inflicted (unlike ours). Justice becomes just US. We are good; they are evil. We go long with the whores of war in a costly and feudal tempt to psychologically project our own evil onto distant others and militarily project our own lust for power and, of coarse, its ostensible security. Our “way of life” is inescapably intertwined with our “way of death.” This ever-popular though pathetic avoidance of assenting to the oneness of humanity is an epic failure to own up to the costs of love. Hate and fear are cheaper, like that cheap plastic crap from China.
Without disposable people, the gears of imperialism and capitalism would grind to a halt in a heart-wrenching imperative to honor every human right. A so-called civilization built around planned obsolescence and cancerous growth rejects, not surprisingly, the priceless sanctity of every human life which would mandate a firewall to the carnage of war. Human rights would go one better than human wrongs. But at what accost? Probably much less than war, but the distribution of pain would be much different. By attending to our own shadow side, we preempt extracting the cost of our own evil from others.
Of course, this costs us — please note that morality is incurring a cost of one’s own, thereby demarcating what we value. Further, a healthy human being replete with love goes even further to absorb some of humanity’s cost from less healthy humans, thereby incarnating the example of love. This is the opposite of war, and, ultimately, the only scoring that matters. Love perpetually extends humanity to each and every human, not amputating human rights to those who don’t happen to be at hand. For badder or worse, love will piss off virtually every in-group of which you are a part. In-group members reliably err on their own privilege over out-group members. Human equality is necessarily revolutionary.
Love and justice kiss when we sacrifice in-group privilege toward securing human rights for all.
May we know the score that is love, demolishing war-making.
POEM: Until Hell Frees Us
Be very frayed
Terrorism comes
From know where
Deep in the recesses
Of kindergarten bullying
Capital vocations
And martial lawlessness
Awe rapped up in won’s highest I deal
Those unspeakable prophets
In security
Detained indefinitely
Until hell frees us
Ever more reckoning
The other
Who war like
A mirror reflection
Knot of won self
But a puerile of grate wisdom
Selling all
Having bought it
With bigger barns
Taking life easy
This is my third published poem in a row on the theme of terrorism. You might say that I’m on a role in combating hypocritical fearmongering and conveniently overlooked accountability for vicious cycles of violence plaguing our whirled. The prison of necessary evil is the bedrock upon which militarism is built. Of coarse, the jailbirds sing oft-repeated jingles of in-group unmistakable righteousness and the presumptively incomprehensible evil descending upon their already worrisome state. Fear is the only effective tool to fuel such jingoism and blind obedience to longstanding systems of oppression that conveniently turn justice into just us. That such fear can swirl in a sea of privilege is the fundamental disconnect that makes chronic injustice passable. Pointing out profound privilege and hyperbolic fears is heretical to the god of war. Not surprisingly, the god of war, Nike, is well characterized by the slogan, “Just do it!” which has a singular ring to rule all idioms. The inescapable prison of the permanent war on terrorism, with violence begetting violence begetting violence, based on the damnable logic of necessary evil, can only end with the absurdity “When hell frees us.” As Dante, in Inferno, signaled in his sign at the entrance of hell, “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” How can we free ourselves from this parent prison of necessary evil that infantilizes our moral development, and stultifies children of God into spawn of the devil? How burden some is at the crux of this issue. What must we sacrifice? What must we cede? What must we feed?
Bringing about peace and justice to the whirled is formidable work that takes a lot of time to cede itself and seed itself. In the mean time, there is a need to endure sum violence, as an existing reality with its own inertia. This brakes the cycle of violence. As well, we need to address the causes and grievances powering violence and dis-empowering nonviolence. This is required to prevent violence from seeding itself, and to feed nonviolent alternatives. This breaks the cycle of violence. This is not easy.
That violence can save us is as owed as life and death itself. The myth of redemptive violence is deep-seated in human history and culture. Walter Wink put it best: “The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known.”
This poem ends with a tip of the hat to two of Jesus’ parables. First, the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21) who has so much that he tears down his barns to build even bigger barns, only to have his “eat, drink, and be merry” life on earth end precipitously. Next, the parable of the hidden treasure, a pearl of great value, for which we will trade all we possess for it (Mathew 13:44-45). That pearl of great price is peace. May each of us be barnstormers for peace, not barn-storers fore violence.
Our lives can begin the long weigh to peace when we get beyond the myth of redemptive violence. May we each critically examine our own privilege and personal hurts that prompt us to take the low road of violence. May we each meditate and daily work on awe the things that make for peace and a whole, new world.
POEM: A Brother Lying
Prey fore the dead
In the name of Jesus
In resurrection of those soully asleep
Getting a phallus rise
Out of Christianity
That is, US
More sow then radical Islam
In violate fundamental lists
Dissembling faith, hope, and love
As our trinity project
Our won God triumph a writ
With a Cain due attitude
Over awe that is Abel
To spill the good word
Buy blood crying out
Too me
From the ground
A brother lying
Knot knowing
The hollowed meaning
Of I am
One’s keeper
I often write about stuff triggered when I hear the news. I listen faithfully to Democracy Now on weekdays. It’s not unusual to stop in the middle of a show, or even a news story, to write a poem about something that touched me: a phrase worthy of seeding a poem, an issue baffling human kind, or simply a heartfelt emotion.
The literal life and death issues of war and peace, militarism and pacifism, have been close to my heart my whole adult life. The latest flavor of this is the unending war on terrorism, which easily commiserates with virulent patriotism, nasty nationalism, presumptive racism, and irreconcilable religious bigotries. Our unconscious privilege, convenient distance, and well-earned ignorance of world affairs is complicit with any easy alliance of violence as a lazy alternative to costly self-sacrifice as the true weigh of incarnating justice for all. Nominal Christianity and its state-sponsored sheep, hawk a cheap grace bound only by an unequaled military budget and unquestioned reverence for a mercenary class.
I have a more generous perception of a frightened citizenry in deed resorting to violence in an increasingly secular, postmodern worldview. Violence seems inevitable, certainly unendurable, without a resilient weigh to measure the sacred worth of an other, a brother human, who peers threatening. I have a less generous view of normalizing violence by those aspiring to be religious, deeply commuted to any of the major faith-based worldviews represented by the world’s religions. In the case of the U.S., the purported rock of our moral lives is Christianity. I assert that an honest appraisal of American Christianity regarding its world military domination is that it is ruggedly cross. American Christians quiet reliably in efface of violence, instead of bearing the rugged cross, demand the blood sacrifice of “others” as their savior. To this I can only say, “Jesus Christ!” Whose image due we bear?! What about state violence has to do with the heart, life and death of Jesus — other than the fact that it was state violence that executed Jesus.
To add insult to injury, the budget-sized war we christen as terrorism, we blame on Muslims, or worse yet, on the sacred tenets of Islam. The real competition may be about who has the shallowest understanding of their religion: nominal Muslim terrorists or nominal Christian war apologists. I strongly suspect that the farces of Christianity have killed more people than the farces of Islam. Regardless, the age-old story of Cain and Abel, shared in the sacred texts of both Christianity and Islam, plays out over and over: brother kills brother and denies the essential nature of their kin relationship and how family should care for one another. May people of faith lead the way in ending violence between all peoples. This goes triple for “People of The Book” (Jews, Christians, and Muslims).
Browse anti-terrorism designs.
POEM: Weepin of Choice
His unwillingness to be a victim
Soully exceeded
Buy his willfulness to be a perpetrator
Better to have
Willed a gun
Than mirrorly get
A ballad in ahead
That imminently natural selection
Of hapless pray
Re: in force
Such patriotic cant
And simp-ly a parent of chorus you can
Too the tear of awe
Weepin’s helled in our hands
Sow a verse
That thin red line
In the thick of
The deference
In the seaminess
Of oppressor and oppressed
The enigmatic quest in
Of weather you can
Have won
Without the other
To shed more hate than light
In discriminating prism
Only to con serve
Cell preservation
Or wherever egos
Fallowing death
A firm life
In mortality
A test too
They’re weepin of choice
This poem is a dramatic ode to the thin line between victim and perpetrator. There is a horror in both estates of being. The truism that hurt people hurt people begs for a broken chain, often presenting itself to beat the hell out of others or take it as unjust a beating. Is there a fare-mined weigh to go on, strike?
The horrific picture in my mind is that of children in war zones enforced into soldiering, specifically by being forced to kill someone else, typically someone they know, as an initiation into the invading forces. Or be killed themselves. The ensuing trauma, and the desperate promise of survival as a perpetrator rather than death or indigency as a victim, often seals one’s fate in a choice beyond most adults, let alone children. Such a display of soul murder is perhaps the most dramatic, even as an epic cautionary tale far removed from the real or contemplated lives of most adults in this world. Nonetheless, the daily bred of the victim-perpetrator cycle is mostly much more subtle and insidious. The routinized bargains most of us make are well fed by seamless self-serving rationalizations and hermetically sealed worldviews safely partitioning good and evil. We are grateful, even thank God, that we happen to be, well, on the good side. Our own cultural in-groups are neatly washed in the wringer of what we typically call civilization, a convenient euphemism for “us” — now, even 25% cleaner; progress you know! Our dark sides are projected on others, safely sequestered in “them” — the looming barbarous hordes, who mostly want to take our way of life (or jobs) — equally progressive and precarious — but will take the life of our hired mercenaries, peace officers, or even ourselves if we let our guard down.
What I hope this poem inspires is some contemplation about what might be that thin chalk line around your soul that defines what you would not do to save your bodily life. What would you not do, even if a gun was pointed at your head? Such a boundary quite starkly outlines that which you re-guard as sacred, worthy of the sacrifice of your bodily life. If your skin in the game is only to protect your own skin (or kin), then the cycle of perpetrator-victim will be incarnated perpetually. Protect your own or sell your kind? What kind of quest in is that? Won of kindness — your own kind and every other kind. Dramatic examples can be highly instructive in contemplating the demarcations of our soul. Still, my hope is to provoke a more thorough deconstruction of our lives, as our lives are sow much more than bodily existence. What in your life would you be willing to lose for a higher purpose? My favorite definition of sacrifice is giving up something of value for something of greater value. I view this trading up as the primary vehicle for living up to our highest values. What material/bodily stuff are you willing to trade up for that which is higher? What parts of your life are you willing to sacrifice for a greater whole? We all end up in a hole; not all become whole or make their fare share of the whole. Of course, the hierarchy of goodness is not simply some binary division of material and spiritual. Our bodies and material goods are gifts to be purposed and re-purposed in the progressive filling and fulfilling of our souls, shared humanity, and awe of creation. If there is anything that all spiritual and religious traditions lift up, it is that our purpose wrests in that beyond our self. Next in line would probably be that we each have a soul responsibility that cannot be contracted to others. As you confront the many weepins in life, may your soul purpose find itself bigger and better, not simply at a loss.
POEM: Born With Two Black Eyes: Owed To New Be and Queens
She was born with two black eyes
Living in a whirled
Wear her highest aspirations
Sore over the lowly color blind
As every color whited out
Yet she sails the sees of dark and light
As two dance freely
A bout just us
As real eyes
Realize
Real lies
And sojourn truth
This poem is a tribute to awe the positive power, beauty and wisdom that Black women birth into this world. De-spite all of the racism, sexism, classism, and other aspersions heaped upon them, they reveal truth responding to a dominant culture of lies. Even as often dealt three strikes from birth, their two Black eyes reveal a compassion honestly earned, unleashing a mother’s love and a sister’s devotion in a world sorely in need of them. I thank you! May every sacrifice you make return a hundred-fold.
POEM: Nevermore Contrived
In the distant future
But not too distant
Man fashions
A machine
That does every thing
For us
For the trees
Imperceptible
To awe but sum
Living in passed tense
Eternal re-pose
Holding sway
In make believe lives
And unexamined lies
So bold over
Weather manner machine
Companied buy nerves of steel
No more tempting stripped ease
Fore incalculable futures
Re-buffed completely
In surging acts of sedation
Knot in any weigh
Quiet getting
What
We came for
Never more
Contrived
This poem is about the many falsehoods being sold as truth in the marketplace of ease and predictability. Such calculating contrivances pawn the notion that two half-truths are of equal value as a singular truth. While many such a fool’s formula are accompanied by beguiling animations, the lively hood they occupy is a barren busyness. Life is not a package deal that can be souled by gimmicks and machinations, no matter how inventive. There is no technology that can substitute for the disciplines of the heart. There is no security system that can supplant the the counsel of courage. There are no makeshift maneuvers that can unseat sacrifice. There is no peril that does not shrink before wisdom. There is no coercion that can do a way with liberty. There is no worldly power or unequaled minions that can equal trust. There is no status or celebrity that is the match of intimacy. There is no brand identity, fan club or religion that can replace true solidarity. There is no ploy that can stand-in for play. There is no narcotic that can super seed hope and dreams. There is no outsourcing of accountability. Reality will have its weigh with you. We must throw our counterfeits into the forge of Mordor, as the hollowed ring of power leads us to false thresholds, revolving adores that steer us to idol pastures and perpetual cowing.
POEM: A Ghastly Alchemy
For just
Some
Dam
Weepin’s permit
I protect and serve
Up my enemies
Like
Cold
Turkey
Shoot
Only to rifle
But growing ode
In a ghastly alchemy
Silver bullets turning to lead
Down the wrong path
Instantly poisoned
Hearts and minds
In the cruelest democracy
Community going
For broke
The simplest solution
Drunk
With wons
Britches down
In a flash
A bad moon rising
Eclipsing gumption
In the forced
And bye-ways
Camouflaging knights
And daze
Seeing evil
Through darkness
And narrow sites
Seeing in for red
Aimed for more heat than light
As mirror man
Shutters a mist
The in side out
As awe the rage
For their own
Good
I mean
Bad
Here is yet another poem against gun violence. When it comes to ballads not bullets, I have plenty of ammunition. Besides just being cruel, violence is inherently anti-democratic. There are inescapable conundrums in eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, other people as a form of building community. Of coarse, many people are willing to sacrifice another than do the hard work of making high ideals manifest. Even the concept of “self” defense razes issues of human rights, inclusiveness, and the sacredness of life. There is little doubt that practicing nonviolence takes great discipline and sacrifice. This is in sharp contrast to the so-called “last-resort” of violence that so lazily creeps up to number one.
At what price do we give up our freedom to practice nonviolence? The Faustian bargain of violence offers an escape from the rigors of morality and authentic community by claiming, “They made me do it,” a convenient denial of one’s freedom — and another’s! Of course, the enforcement of might makes right extracts the bulk of the price from others, the opposite of self-discipline and sacrifice. Creating community is costly, just as destroying community is costly. The real question is: Who pays the cost and who reaps the benefits (in the case of destruction, of what remains)? As in the dysfunction of capitalism, where greed and selfishness are raised up as virtues necessary to “progress”, violence is about getting the most benefit for oneself (and one’s kin) at the lowest cost to oneself. Not surprisingly, when the lowest common denominator is oneself, and greed is a virtue, community, which prospers on the common good, suffers. The fundamental problem is that the destruction of violence extracts a cost from the whole (community) that can only be rationalized in piecemeal, selfish fashion. Violence is an attempt to shift a cost to others. This works in part when you force others to experience loss due to your violence, and the cost of this is disproportionately shared by your victims. However, there is no substitute for your own moral agency. Your responsibility cannot be “cost shifted” to others (only the effects of your irresponsibility can). This is the irrevocable loss of moral failings. Morality is simply exercising your freedom in a responsible way. Saying you don’t have a choice, e.g, “They made me do it,” is a cop out. Morality isn’t easy; if it was, everybody would be doing it! In short, wielding lethal weapons is perhaps the worst way to demonstrate personal responsibility. Guns are the lowest form of community. Even if guns are the last resort, this is not a resort in which I want to live.
POEM: Wolves in Elephants’ Clothing
Wolves in Elephants’ Clothing
Somewhat sheepishly
She whispered
Beware of wolves in elephants’ clothing
Lurking about
Only looking
Like they want
To kick some ass
Though you can skulk in style
If you have
A grand
Old party
Securing your plush seat
At the table
Loaded
With elephant guise
Rather incestual sycophants
At their I’m potentate parties
And if you are well, off
They will take you
To a tee
Spouting about
King George I and King George II
And unjust taxes
More dear than all the tea in England
And buy George, they’re not satisfied with a billion
Let alone a third
Perhaps some fresh prince all over
A newly-minted crime scene
Unseemly blind to any lackey of evolution
Yet there is no ruler
To measure their monkey business
Their trinity
Cheering with pomposity
Throwing monologues on the fire
And stalling
Having perfected the nationwide holdup
A three wring circus
And we are left
With what’s in the stall
The elephant dropping
All that is fertile
For phony fossils
Making evolution impossible
A lessen they never forget
With a mellifluousness Abel
To capture the common man
A cleanliness next to godlessness
Their hoods white
For shadowing their golden daze
In an urbane jungle
Leaving behind poor gramma
Spelling her downfall
GOP opposed to GOD
Having fallen
Down
And can’t get up
Leaving students
With nothing but a prayer
Leaving workers
With a free market they can’t afford
Leaving US
With life after death
And perhaps before birth
Still
All the wile between
Sent to our gloom
To be
Or not to be
Borne again
That is the quest in
Whether it is know buller
For in the mine to suffer
The blings
And ere rows
Of outrageous fortunes
Oar to take alms
Against a see of troubles
And by opposing thumb end
Overcoming any
Hitch
Hiking what’s left
As necessary
Sew much more than
Evolution
One of the scarce things
They can’t seem to buy
Their con science
Of what
They know longer nose
Inescapably figuring
Somehow elect by birth
Perpetual SNOBS
Where the N is usually silent
In their civil war
Inevitably impaled by their mortal compass
Spinning north and south
Feigning uprightness
Disavowing any revolution present
Captivated by fanciful futures
And realities passed
And still
What goes around
Comes around
A choice truth
Either buy
Ballads or bullets
We all have the write to choose
To ward off electioneer death
This poem is a thinly veiled anti-Republican party exposition. Profoundly ironic, Republicans are as sure proof as you are going to find that evolution doesn’t exist, and, as Gandhi never said, “Be the lack of change you want to see in the world.” The Republican party appears quite comfortable with greed as the primary human motivation. Perhaps worse yet, and even more disingenuous, is the ease at which Republicans embrace anti-science views, of which anti-evolution and climate change skepticism are its hallmarks. For the so-called religious expertise that Republicans claim, they certainly manage to brand religion as anti-science, which it need not be. Even within the hallowed halls of religious territory, Republicans manage to bring hypocrisy to ever-new heights. With their specialty Christianity, Republicans paint a picture of Jesus as if he were a white, suburban-living, English-speaking American, preaching some prosperity gospel. For God’s sake, Jesus wasn’t even a Christian, he was a Jew, and a Palestinian Jew at that! If such a poor, dark-skinned, Middle-eastern, non-English-speaking, peace-loving, giver of free health care showed up in America, the Republicans would have reserved seating at his crucifixion. Of course, they would contract out the actual killing, though a carpenter driving in those nails would not likely be a member of the carpenters’ union. Plus, the Republicans definitely wouldn’t bother paying a “living” wage for such low skilled tasks, however unpleasant.
The larger theme in this poem is about the tension between electoral and non-electoral politics. The two-party duopoly of Republocrats offers only a narrow range of possibilities deemed politically feasible. This leaves the electorate, barely even a majority of eligible voters in many elections, to ratify the predetermined candidates from a relatively narrow ideological pool. In my view, this electoral desert leaves little room for the kind of robust responses that the current world begs. Our slow and limited responses to climate change and energy use demonstrate this best. Even a well-managed end of civilization as we know it is a poor substitute for saving humanity. Of course, the “ballads or bullets” dichotomy is somewhat hyperbolic for effect. Nonetheless, without nonviolent revolution, or much-speeded evolution, our current body politic will experience a much more violent demise. I am rooting and working for a nonviolent revolution. The driving force of this revolution will almost certainly originate outside formal electoral politics. As history teaches us, such robust change does not come without personal sacrifice, and it demands courage. The Republicans would be well-advised to learn from Jesus, who showed us a different way. And who better than Jesus would know that just because you are a carpenter doesn’t mean that you have to see everything as a nail!