aug 21 in idea barrages

Freedom Patriots (TM) where are you with your make-you-feel-like-a-big-man murder sticks you’re so proud of, when police are attacking protestors in the streets? I thought you were all Don’t Tread On Me? I guess you’re just Whatever Enforces My Racism, huh.

Buildings can be rebuilt. Economies can recover. The dead can’t be brought back. The past is a dream, the future imaginary. There’s only the suffering now & what we can do to ameliorate it. Objects, ideals, these mean nothing in the face of trying to be realistically humane.

We are not here to prove points. We are not here to own stuff. We are not here to have power. We are not here to be strident or powerful or pure. The meaning of life is to ameliorate each others’ suffering. We are here to ease each other’s pain.

In this dream, I was at some kind of irony convention. Over the course, all the booths panels & exhibitions got less funny, more desperate & sad. I hit an escape button & woke up, Felix the cat at my side, Am I his psychopomp? Are we all just each other’s psychopomps?

Improving the world is a process. Electing Biden just to stop the bleeding is one step on a path to stabilizing the wounds we’ve received in the last four years. Step one. Canceling him so Sanders can lose very very badly just to prove a point would only further infect our wound.

More than half the work of progress is holding that already achieved. It’s no straight line, we fight entropy too. Folks took their eyes off the ball for Sanders’ impossible promises of quick easy change & it only took 3 years for Trump & Putin to push us back 70.

The impatience built into us by our vanishingly brief lives is the greatest weapon to be used against us. It breeds hate, it breeds fear, it breeds rash action that only makes things worse. It’s hard to find a moral arc in a universe where we blink in & out like Christmas lights.

To “accomplish” the “feat” of climbing Mt. Everest, you don’t just need enormous wealth & a psychotic sense of invincibility, you must climb over the corpses of those who failed before you, desecrating their graves as you clamber. Just to “prove” something. How about… no?