This is from the Bible.
Proverbs 6:16-19
“There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.“
Hey! Did you hear Don Trump’s hawking Bibles? Yep. He is. That’s going well.
There’s a lot of fighting going on. A lot of anger and hatred. A lot of putting down and hurting other groups of people. It’s weird. We’re tribal, most definitely. We have this ability to see a forest but not a tree and then hate on the forest, of course.
It’s weird but it’s not new. We hear more about it thanks to 24-hour access to the Internet. Which not only shows it but feeds it. That being said, I just relish watching people on Instagram videos go all dumbass hateful right into someone else’s camera and I’m right there to watch it. So there’s also a fascination, like with Trump. He absolutely fascinates. His baldfaced lies, incredible, and very vocal hatred, meanness and malice, obvious mental instability and then the fact that so many people like him, and because of these same traits. That’s fascinating! And especially if he were an evil character in a movie.
But he’s real. I wonder what will happen to his fans when he dies and that of course is not far off. He’s almost 80 now. The world shall weep as one. Just kidding.
We hate people for their hobbies. We hate people for their clothing. We hate people for their accent. We hate people for their skin tone. We hate people for their features. We hate people for their food. We hate people for their children. We hate people for their vehicles. We hate people for their difference. We hate people for the noise they make. We hate people for their worship. We hate people for their language. We hate people for their names. We hate people for their art. We hate people for their birthplace. We hate people for their current residence. We hate people for their beliefs. We hate people for their family. We hate people for their prayers. We hate people for their books. We hate people for their sexuality. We hate people for their gender. We hate people for their hatred.
This would be a program designed to bring families out of poverty, enhance and fill in their education, and set them on a path to a new life. And I just made it up so it might not work, or the numbers are wrong, or just an all-around bad idea, but here goes:
Create a gated community outside the city, with 25-50 1,000 – 2,000 square foot homes, outfitted with quality furniture and appliances, all very simple and very clean. The gate, by the way, is serious, for a host of reasons. There would be lots of trees and green spaces, a main hall to meet, play games and celebrate, an office for administration and a pole barn/garage for groundskeeper/gardener and for training residents to work on the grounds and garden.
Other employees would include a caseworker for every ten homes (5), a part-time bookkeeper, banker or accountant to work with families on financial literacy, 3-5 admin positions, security (2), said groundskeeper, and a professional childcare worker and residents working as child-care employees.
Buses would run from community to city and back every two hours from 8a to 10p, with some small number of stops (close to or at mass transit pick-ups). Residents would be required to work from the age of 16 and over. High schoolers 16 – 18 could get out of work requirements when playing a sport or doing other school-related activities. Residents would also be required to sign in and out when they come and go. Allow each family to bring in enough of their own stuff to fill a 10 x 10 shed in the back.
We assume although are not certain that this venture should bring in lots of willing support through donations and in many other ways, doctors, psychologists, nurses, dentists, chefs/nutritionists and others might donate their time, etc. Bring in artists, musicians, athletes and actors to entertain and to teach art, music, athletics and acting.
Illegal drugs and drunkenness would be prohibited.
$4,000,000 to $5,000,000 for land, to build and other start up costs
$1,200,000 for yearly salaries
$200,000 per year for general upkeep
1,500,000 / 50 = $30,000 per family, per year
2,000,000 / 50 = $40,000 per family, per year
As residents work, they pay some sort of rent out of their paycheck; it would be low, but something to keep them in the paying for things mindset, that would be true of utilities as well. They would be expected to buy their own groceries and everything else once they get settled in and working. Families would be parent(s) and one to four kids. Once the kids are 19, they must move out. Parents move out when kids are out, or before if they desire it, or if it is felt that they’re ready to do so, which we would hope would happen the most often.
Just thinking out loud here…
I’ve never heard of the Fred guy, but this album is perfect. It’s Eno up and down and this Fred fella brings all the right vocals. This is a great record.
“Leaves are staying on the trees of northwestern Ohio a month longer than they did a century ago.”
And
“The number of stars visible in the sky will fall by 60 percent in the next eighteen years.”
And
“…and windy outdoor conditions were worsening bacterial contamination on chicken farms in the America West.”
And
“Five-year-olds will believe a trustworthy robot over an unreliable human, even if the robot is shaped like a truck.”
Too many Americans continue to believe in the trucks long past five years old.
From Harpers Magazine, “Findings”, June 2023.
This is all George Carlin as quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly (sign up and support it if you can), which is an amazing publication bringing in old and new writings on a quarterly theme, and in this case, Freedom:
“I found a very liberating position for myself as an artist. And that was I sort of gave up on the human race and gave up on the American dream, and culture, and nation, and decided that I didn’t care about the outcome. And that gave me a lot of freedom from a kind of distant platform to be sort of amused, kind of to watch the whole thing with a combination of wonder and pity, and try to put that in words…Not having an emotional stake in whether this experiment with human beings works.”
Then: “I root for the big comet, I root for the big asteroid to come and make things right…I’m rooting for that big one to come right though that hole in the ozone layer because I want to see it on CNN…Philosophers say, Why are we here? I know why I’m here. The show. Bring it on… We’ve seen a lot of comedians who seem to have a political bent in their work, and always implicit in the work is some positive outcome, that this is all going to work. If only we do this, if only we pass that bill, if only we elect him. It’s not true.”
“It’s circling-the-drain time.”
Wow. And don’t it feel just like that sometimes? I watched the most surreal thing I’ve seen in years of the Tennessee, I believe, House of Representatives, kicking three of their members out for disrupting for a moment during session (then they called recess) but continuing on arguing that they, the house, needed to deal with children being exploded into flying flesh, bone and brain, with AR-15s. These were two very young representatives and they made the point that this is their future and deserved for it to be looked at in terms of Tennessee gun laws. Instead, the republicans tossed them – threw em out. Well, at least one, when I last looked. No due process, no, like, okay, you’re going to be stripped of your committee assignments. The Tennessee legislature with a something like 70/30 republican to democrat hold, tossed three dems, two of which were young people of color, for using a bullhorn and, well, telling the truth.
How can we live in this world without feeling just like George Carlin? I’ve been watching for decades and more recently watching the Republican Party unravel into some sort of angry group of victimized, fearful and fear-mongering tribe. They did it and with pride (hubris) and a sense of goodness. What would Jesus say? That should be enough for any sitting republican. Are you doing what Jesus Christ would do?
But I can’t go so far as the brilliant comedian has. I’m still pissed watching them undermine all of our sacred laws, our constitution and everything else to soothe their fragile egos. It’s sad. It’s like some sort of movie about some kids who were dissed by the cool kids and so now are into their revenge. Not cool, republicans. Not cool at all.
“…in 2017 the Kentucky Coal Museum covered its roof with 80 solar panels because the technology saved the organization money.”
Susan Joy Hassol, Scientific American Magazine
There’s something awesome about that, but pretty much how it’s been here in reality. Big corporations have been planning for climate change for decades, the military even longer, but out here in TV land, we ain’t gonna plan for nothin’!
The release of heat trapping gases last year was the highest ever recorded. And there’s really no denying that a climate crisis is upon us as we watch giant storm after giant storm, heat wave after flood after fire rattle the nation and the world. We’ll survive, but we have to agree that mitigating the effects of climate change will be extremely expensive. Like, really fucking expensive – cleaning up after storms, floods and fires, moving homes, people and infrastructure, dealing with the massive migrations away from the equator. If we’re thinking we have border issues now, have a seat and watch this.
So how can we in good conscience pretend that what we’re all doing is still okay, and that we got rights to burn all the fuel we want, whenever we want, and how we want? It’s ludicrous and really, really, really fucking mean to our kids, grandkids, great grandkids and onward. At this point, we are the absolute worst fucking ancestors in the history of the planet.
Yeah, sorry about that whole “earth” thing, kid. Here’s the bill.
Taking a shower tonight I reached into the skyline of shampoo, conditioner and who knows what else is in there and I grabbed one that said, “Hair Mask”. Imagine that. A mask for your hair. We live in a nation where a much too large portion of the population was unwilling to wear a mask over their mouth and nose during an airborne pandemic to protect their friends and family. An airborne pandemic, by the way, that killed more than one million of us. I wonder how they’d feel about a hair mask.
But on the positive side, all the rest of us did! We masked up and for all sorts of reasons. Some people were afraid for themselves, wanting to stay healthy, not wanting to die (go figure), but didn’t we even more often hear people talk about other people, as in, I have to make sure I have a mask and get a test before Saturday when I go visit my grandma? Stuff like that-there. It was a beautiful thing and we can be very proud of the effort we all made. We saved millions of lives by doing the right thing.
A democracy like ours needs its people to pull together occasionally no matter what you believe. We need to make sure that we insert a little responsibility to all those rights we like to talk about. And most of us did. Warms the heart.
It’s the art of politics on the right side of the aisle here in the good old USA. But if you see us as one nation, under God and all of that, shouldn’t y’all be working harder to engage and assuage? Why would anyone want to pit one group of Americans against another? What are they hoping to achieve?
And beyond just politics, we do in general very much like our groups, those with whom we share something important to us, be that an address, a job, a style of dress, a place of worship, a school, a sport, a pop star, a hobby. And we are proud of those groups and so when our group pride is somehow hurt, we rally our group against other groups, ostensibly our enemies, but almost always just a bunch of Americans who ultimately share the same beliefs about life, love, family and friends.
So what do we do? We resort to inflating the importance of small issues, things that might look or sound bad or wrong or weird, but are ultimately no skin off our backs. And we say these things over and over to keep people thinking about them (they say that hearing something 14 times will lead a person to action). It’s called propaganda, and it works.
Anger, distrust, unhappiness, jealousy, and ultimately violence; that is what they’re hoping to achieve. And when you think about it, the more we’re beating up on one another down here in the trenches of life, the rich and powerful stay busy, accumulating more power, and getting richer and richer and richer.
Most people my age and older have some knowledge of, and may have the image (above) seared into their mind of when Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire to protest the police and Vietnamese army’s massacre of Vietnamese people during a celebration that turned into a protest. At the time Vietnam was 90% Buddhist but the current ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem, was Catholic and wanted to “westernize” the nation and so banned the display of religious flags. On May 8, 1963, they celebrated Phat Dan, or the day of the birth of the Buddha, religious flags were displayed, and the massacre ensued. A month later, on June 11, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk who was not at the massacre, sat down in the middle of the same street, began meditating, set himself on fire (doused in gasoline) and sat motionless as he burned to death.
An American photographer happened to be on the scent and got the iconic, jaw-dropping photos that exploded across the globe. Thich Nhat Hanh, another Vietnamese buddhist monk, prolific author and teacher, often brought him up in his writings, and while I never committed the man’s name to memory, I never forgot that image since I saw it as a teenager in the 1970s.
Recently, a blip in my online, 24-hour news feed, filled with stories of mass shootings, war in Ukraine, awful American (and worldwide) politicians and people, and the ongoing, ever-expanding destruction of the planet thanks in large part to human-induced burning of fossil fuels, was something about an American who did something similar in Washington DC. I’m appalled and embarrassed how little attention I paid.
Reading the obituaries in the local paper this morning I stopped cold when I saw: “on the steps of the Supreme Courthouse…”
“Bruce, Wynn Alan
Born in Green Bay WI Aug 25, 1971 and died on Earth Day April 22, 2022 on the steps of the Supreme Courthouse in Washington DC. His father, Douglas Bruce (Holly), mother Martha, stepbrother Eric (Jamie), extended family and friends in Minnesota and Boulder, CO and around the country are greatly saddened by his death but respect and honor his commitment to the issues of climate change and the environment.”
Unless you’ve got your head jammed straight up your ass and/or have been fooled by extremely effective but idiotic right wing media, you understand what is happening right now to our climate due to humankind. I’m human and not at all pretending I’ve been doing much myself. In fact, my passion for doing something about this has been washed away, shall we say, having watched the world (and more importantly, individuals like you and me) do absolutely nothing about it.
Scientists have been warning us for decades, and year after year, the climate has been proving them almost exactly right, but to pretty much no avail. So I’m now at this point hopeless we’ll do much about it and wondering what we’ll do about the consequences. How will we handle the flooding of coastal and inland low lying areas? What will we do about the incredible heat waves that will make many places currently filled with humans uninhabitable? How about the massive fires that will only get worse and worse? Who’s going to pay to rebuild after the super storms keep coming and damaging property, farmland, and infrastructure? And in the current pandemic of xenophobia what will we do with the mass migrations due to heat, flooding, fires, storms and water shortages?
Of course, we’re already paying for increasing storm damage, controlling and putting out growing fires, cleaning up and relocating people after massive flooding, but it’s that last one that I really worry about. Here in the U.S. people are filling their pants because there are 60,000 people at the southern border trying to get into our nation of 330 million people. What about when there are 10, 50 or 100 million people clamoring to get in? What big beautiful wall is going to stop them? How about when the entire population of Southwest U.S. starts running north and east? What happens then?
We’ll see. Then, by the way, is only a few decades out, maybe sooner. But here we sit, doing nothing and not even noticing, when Green Bay’s own, Wynn Alan Bruce, sits down in plain view and burns himself to death in an incredibly brave warning to all of us of what’s coming. Blip.
Luke Soiseth 