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Dependence Day By John Daniel

It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag, a day of staying home instead of crowding away, a day we celebrate nothing gained in war but what we’re given—how the sun’s warmth is democratic, touching everyone, and the rain is democratic too, how the strongest branches in the wind give themselves as they resist, resist and give themselves, how birds could have no freedom without the planet’s weight to wing against, how Earth itself could come to be only when a whirling cloud of dust pledged allegiance as a world circling dependently around a star, and the star blossomed into fire from the ash of other stars, and once, at the dark zero of our time, a blaze of revolutionary light exploded out of nowhere, out of nothing, because nothing needed the light, as the brilliance of the light itself needs nothing.

[thanks to the Poetry Foundation]

Selections from an article by Kate Aronoff for The Guardian

“In a major environmental case, the court has made clear that it would rather represent the interests of corporations and the super-rich than the needs and desires of the vast majority of Americans – or people on Earth.

“In its Thursday ruling on West Virginia v EPA – in line with a string of decisions that will make life here more dangerous – the US supreme court all but declared that war, curtailing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plants under a provision of the Clean Air Act and – more worryingly – striking an opening blow to the government’s ability to do its job.

“… Polluters have always been happy to throw small fortunes at the right’s quest for minority rule, keen to protect fossil fuel profits and their ability to dump waste into the air and water from pesky things like democracy. As Nancy MacLean writes in Democracy in Chains, Charles Koch took a special interest in destroying public education, thus maintaining de facto segregation, before leading the charge against climate policy at every level of government. He continues to be a generous funder of the Federalist Society, an instrumental force in building and filling the pipeline of clerks, judges and cases that has created the judicial branch as we know it, and rulings like the one that overturned Roe v Wadelast week. Secretive dark-money outfits like Donors Trust, as well as Chevron and the Scaife Foundation – furnished by old oil and aluminum money – have joined him.

“West Virginia v EPA itself was brought with the help of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a network of state attorneys general whose own funders include the country’s biggest fossil fuel companies and the beleaguered coal barons who had the most to lose from the modest power plant regulations. They also spent $150,000 sponsoring Trump’s rally on 6 January.

“The interests of the country’s wealthiest residents and corporations are at odds with the vast majority of people who live here. Luckily for the right, a political system designed by slaveholders provides an easy on ramp to concretize minority rule, encasing their power within definitionally undemocratic institutions. With a young, ideological rightwing majority on the court, there’s no telling how far they might go. And there’s not much that can stop them.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/01/the-us-supreme-court-just-declared-war-on-the-earths-future

We’re playing

Covid

Mutation

Roulette

But all of life is

  a dangerous

   Bet

    Will tonight be the night

       a drunk driver

 Puts  Out My Light?

            It’s Covid

            Mutation

            Roulette

            You don’t know

            If its done

            Yet

            Viruses Mutate

            And the sun sets

            It’s Covid

            Mutation

            Roulette

            And love is a bet

            That lovers

            Can tell the truth

can anyone now

be honest with you?

            Like Covid

            Mutation

            roulette

If there was some kind of betting parlor for it, I’d bet two thousand dollars on the triumph of lies brought about by Trump’s presidency–lies effectuated by the degradation of consensus reality; a degradation produced by the mindless use of social media….

I will vote for Democrats, and fight for Democracy–but I would bet money on the imminent midterm elections giving congress to the GOP, and the 2024 election being stolen by Trump or a Trumpy, with the collusion of a GOP-led congress. Then will come theocracy, an end to democracy, a restoration of racial segregation–and worse. I fervently hope I’m wrong.

The optimism part? I’m certain that something over half of America will be outraged when the country is stolen by the extreme-right corporate oligarchy; when flagrant racism and the oppression of women becomes the order of the day. This outrage will split the nation into a de facto geographic balkanization. Something like discrete mini-nations, official or unofficial, will become the norm within the USA, formed around progressive zones: California, the NE USA, Washington State (Oregon could go either way), in reaction to the takeover of the theocratic right…

Militias formed by progressives will defend these stubbornly progressive regions. But the federal military, with the US Army and Marines, its Navy and Air Force, its tanks and missiles, will be controlled by the rightist regime. Only a sadly improbable revolution organized from within the federal military could lead us back to a unified democratic nation. Still, optimistically, there will be areas of the USA–the geographical USA at least–which may remain free and Democratic…locally. And who knows what technological innovations, what hacks, what new drone technologies, could be deployed by the Unified Progressive States…

The monastery, on the lower slopes of Mt Everest, was a tumbledown affair, there being only five surviving monks to maintain it. Renegade soldiers had attacked it, a year before, and now all five of the surviving Vipassana monks were working to rebuild it stone by stone, with their bare hands.  I arrived weary, and my head throbbed–I wasn’t used to the thinner air here. I bowed to the nearest monk, a man of middle aged in the robe of a Master, and said, “I am here to study. I was sent by Hanh.” The monk ignored me, and adjusted the stone on its crumbling wall. I had used the proper language. Why was he ignoring me? I was nettled. It had been hard enough to get here, without being ignored too… “I am Dedeman,” I said. “I am here as appointed.”

The monk ignored me. I was puzzled. There was no vow of silence at this monastery and I had committed no solecism. 

One of the other acolytes spoke to the Master. “I thought I heard someone say, ‘I am here.’ But–I believe it was the wind.”

“Yes,” the Master told him. “No one but else but we five are here–thus it must have been a trick of the wind.”

I smiled. “Perhaps if I set to work with you? I am here, after all, to work…”

“Again I heard a sound like ‘I am here,” said the acolyte. “Perhaps an echo?”

“If a newcomer was here,” said the Master to the acolyte, “I would sense it. A man is not here if he is asleep. There is someone here who is asleep. He speaks in his sleep. No one is truly here but we five…”

Suddenly I understood. I gathered all my attention to the present moment, and to the sphere of fine energies around me; I stopped identifying with my weariness, my irritation. I was now quite present. “I am here,” I said.

“Ah yes,” said the Master, nodding at me. “Here you are. We have been expecting you.”

“You!”

“What? Who’s that? I can’t see who’s talking…!”

“I’m down here, by your feet!” Pierce  called out, shouting up to the giant. “Careful where you step  with your gigantically reeking feet you great enormous lummox!”

“So!” cried the God of Daily Irritations. The giant towered over the human who dared to challenge him in the castle carved out of the upper quarter of Mount Prestidigitation. “I see you now: a little shred, a worm, a mort of a man! How came you here?”

“The clouds parted in the spring wind–and thereupon I beheld your ugly hulking goat-faced person, flinging persistent irritations, minor mishaps, and annoying bad luck upon the people of Oblivious Valley!”

 “But I am invisible to mortals! How could a vile monkey-dropping such as yourself see me at work?”

“Ha! Were you not such a thick, dim, blockheaded nitwit you might have logically deduced I have used Revelation Spectacles! I inherited them from Uncle Mortimer who was too cowardly to put them on! Now, you discourteous lout! Explain yourself!”

“Tiny pink fleck of snot, you see but you do not see! I was tasked by the Dark Gods to spread small woes so that you would be too busy to guess the Great Woe, and do something about it!”

“And what is the Great Woe, you unspeakably tremendous waste of space!”

“Why–it is letting small things distract you from the Grace of Living! But you shall never report this to your kind, for now I shall crush you under my feet, and make you the blot you have always been destined to be!”

But as the giant lifted his gigantic foot, Pierce drew his sword, braced its pommel in a crack of the stone floor, and leapt to one side. The foot came slamming down and impaled upon the sword. The giant leapt about, clutching at its foot, and howling, “Aiee! Fuck you, you little shit!”

“No fuck you!” cried Pierce. “For I am away to inform my people of your perfidy–fare-unwell, you pestilence!” And with that, Pierce sprinted under a stone table and out the drainage pipe he’d used to enter the carven castle. . .

Of course there are good habits. I’m in the habit of meditation, that’s a good habit. I’m in the habit of cleaning up after myself in the kitchen. A good habit. But within me operates a parasitic vine, or several of them intertwined–of bad habits. Such is the human condition.

The grip of this parasitic vine can be challenged, and some of the ivy, some of the strangle-weed in my inner self, can be cut away. It’s got a hard bark on it, and it’s resistant to cutting, but it can be done. Or more accurately it can can be *seen* away–there is a process, called self observation, allowing us to turn some of our attention to ourselves in the most objective perspective we can manage, and in seeing a negative, problematic habit, we’re able to work against it by degrees. First, just seeing it–not just saying “I see that I have this habit” but literally seeing it as if it were physically manifest–has the curious effect of gradually weakening it.

And this means seeing it without self-reproach. Honesty but not self-condemnation. Just “Oh, there is my tendency to deflect blame onto someone else…Or: ah, once again I see my tendency to lose myself in social media…Or: yes, once again I see that I have the bad habit of spending energy defending my vanity…” Seeing it as a kind of vine is a bit of a revelation–I realize these bad habits work together, reinforce one another. And in the organic structure of my psychology they are almost literally parasitic vines. They draw energy away from me that could be used for a thousand positive experiences…When I build up the “databank” of self-knowledge, of seeing myself, I am less identified with the bad habits, less subject to their grip. By degrees I can become someone realer, and freer…

Shortly after the Big Bang, space began to expand, and the strong electromagnetic force broke up into four basal forces: the strong nuclear force, the “weak” nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. Soon, space’s expansion increased in intensity, interacting with the four basal forces to spawn various particles, which became a gigantic expanding continuum of chaos. But there were certain highly distinct particles thrown off by the process: particles of pure mind. Naked awareness.

The particles of pure mind located one another; they were not positively or negatively charged, they were choice-charged, and at first they chose to merely rotate around one another, gazing into each other, one reflecting into the other, and aware of it–like conscious mirrors. As more mind particles gathered, more raw intellect reflected and back and forth and up and down and in every direction, like light bouncing within a mirror-ball which had its mirrors facing inward. This process merged all the particles into a taut organization, a field of pure mind which collectively became one individual consciousness. The Mind. And thanks to each mind-particle’s innate willingness to coordinate–to work with others in a field–The Mind developed a selfhood that could ponder, wonder, and project ideas.

The remainder of the universe was chaos. Crude laws existed within the chaotic interactions of particles; but any systems randomly arising were ephemeral, they didn’t last, as they could not withstand the general randomness. Eventually, these laws would result in the creation of stars and planets. But chaos still ruled.

The Mind had a center that was particularly concentrated, so much that this concentration engendered feeling. And what it felt, firstly, was…alone. All it had to turn to, in all the universe, was chaos. But chaos was unresponsive. Chaos had no Mind.

The Mind sought to obtain something besides random energy signals from chaos. How could it give chaos a mind? Another mind on the scale of The Mind was not possible in the vast chaotic universe. But perhaps in limited areas some sort of smaller mind could be created.

The Mind mentally envisioned what could happen if a discrete complex of reactivity within the great endless body of chaos was precisely stimulated. The projection showed the Mind that reproducible patterns were feasible. Each mind-particle within The Mind’s consciousness had a micron of an erg of kinetic energy at its disposal. That energy could be a nudge. Carefully applied to set up a concatenation in just the right spot in the whirling chaos, the little nudge could create a small system. And it was a system that would replicate itself.

So, Mind experimented, and made a replicating system happen. This new, tiny, individual system was a sort of molecular womb. The Mind was then able to dispatch a mind-particle of itself with another nudge, into the replicating system. That mind-particle was able to experience the new micro-system from within. The mind-particle in the system kept in touch with the big primal mind, using “spooky action at a distance”, so that its experiences could be shared by original Mind…The Mind felt less alone…

More systems were created, and they were nudged to evolve into cells. The possibility of DNA, mentally envisaged by The Mind and implanted into the probability matrix of each cell, brought the first genetic molecules into being.

The cells reproduced and interconnected and evolved as groups. More particles of mind were interwoven into the groups…And as organisms developed more complex brains, they attracted more and more mind-particles. Their offspring gradually became sentient, unknowingly sharing what they experienced with the Mind. Over time, The Mind itself began to evolve, in a way other than biologically, developing fine degrees of empathy. Subjective communications came about between it and the organisms…It began to work at making these communications clearer, over time…Conversations were had….

The Mind was no longer lonely.

One can make an argument that this is really a time of such emergency that the political niceties and routine strategies, as we see–quite understandably –in the Jan. 6 committee–are outmoded. The congressional January 6th committee is important, vital. But it cannot go far enough. As Paul Waldman just said in the Washington Post:

And at this intense period in the conflict between the Republican and Democratic parties, the audacity gap between the two has seldom been more striking…On March 16, “Eastman and others spent nearly two hours behind closed doors pressuring Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to nullify the 2020 election and reclaim the electors awarded to Biden.”

This is how people behave when they believe there are no consequences for their actions. And you can understand why they might think that. Trump — whose entire life is a tribute to the power of audacity — pardoned Manafort, along with a rogues’ gallery of crooks and grifters who made up his cronies, from Roger Stone to Stephen K. Bannon. And who in the Republican Party has condemned Eastman, or Manafort for that matter? Almost no one. They know that there are no ethical or moral transgressions that will get you banished from the GOP; the only meaningful sin is disloyalty.

We see a hard, mindless turn to the right in many of the American people as well as in the GOP congress. But that’s just the beginning. There are other factors that may spread this rightist extremist reactivity vastly farther. Something is going to happen, socially and politically, likely in our lifetimes, and it’s going to be the great  defining challenge for humanity. Climate change is going to drive a vast redistribution of populations. Climate change will make vast swathes of the world unlivable and other areas essentially non-arable. It will be tremendously difficult to cultivate enough food crops or protein sources in those conditions.

People who are now friendly to immigrants, will be challenged to keep that quite-laudable spirit of acceptance. Hundreds of millions of people will–in desperation–crowd into Europe from other places, far more swiftly and overwhelmingly than now. And North America will have its own increase in immigration. It will be a humanitarian necessity–-but there will be resistance, even from people who politically moderate. Some liberals may lose their liberality… When people feel their lives really pressed upon, when they feel sacrifices are asked of them, they may lose that margin, that latitude, for acceptance. Easy to support people in the Third World when they’re not rushing in to your own environs and competing with you. (Again–these immigrants will have no choice, and cannot be condemned for their emigration.) As a consequence of all this, true fascism will have its best opportunity in decades... In our own nation we’ll see scarcity like we’ve never seen before…And that will spark an instinctual turn to xenophobia. Good people, trying to feed their children, can suddenly become very cold…

Our only hope is to prepare for this vast displacement of populations. The decent, and truly necessary response, will be to find room for these people. To help them. But will even good people do the decent thing? Or will they surrender to fascist anti-immigrant demagogues? We must be pro-active in fighting the new GOP here, in preparation for the greater fight against fascism to come.

By Linda Pastan

Isn’t the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn’t the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn’t banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask “Why are you sad so often?” Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.