What’s Going On?

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I’ve wanted to write about how Trump being elected has made me feel for quite some time now, but  there’s so much that it’s hard to figure out what to say and every day we see a next example of his hideousness.

I even spent some time searching to see if I could find enough explanations of things he has done, may do, is doing, that would give me pause and help me believe it’s not as bad as I feel it is. No luck so far.

So, I took a break and tried to step back from my frustration, disappointment and anger with those who put Trump in power. I know a few of you personally. I don’t know you as hateful people. I know you as people who believe you are caring, fair, just and I have heard your concerns, your personal struggles, your fears and I understand them even when I don’t agree with them on principle, or when I know I am able to see a bigger picture perhaps, than you. So I can see that it would seem you just don’t realise that you’re not in that bad a position, and a lot of the elements of your American Dream actually require YOU to make things happen for yourself. It may just be that your attitude and entitlement are what's holding you back, and now you’re following the age old habit of laying blame at the feet of those who have historically been exploited and denied the rights you relatively comfortably enjoy.

Yeah, I hear some of you crying, “No! That’s not me!” – I voted against the corrupt/non-functioning/whatever-adjective system of government, the cronyism, the Fed…ok. Fair enough. You chose to replace ‘bad and urgently in need of a serious reworking’ with lawless. Very Wild West. Actually, very  North Korea, very ISIS, very Marcos, Saddam, very Great Turkmenbashi – and please don’t say  the ‘Communist’ elements make him totally different – no, they do not, Stalin, Putin, Kim family, Trump family – there’s a lot more in common than you realise. Not so much with Fidel though, who was much more a man of the peoples and led his country to great levels of social and scientific achievements, or with many of your county’s other old Central and South American 'enemies' who’s legitimate governments, yours has long fought to depose through covert wars and replace with corrupt dictators who work to fill your corrupt power-mongers' pockets.

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I’m, of course, not an American, I don’t live there and I doubt I ever will. But I live in America’s back yard, in the small island states that number among the neighbours that America has historically enjoyed fucking with. So I have a genuine, valid, real, reason to have a say. I think the whole world does anyway since America anointed itself ‘Leader of the Free World’ – you don’t get rights without responsibility and if you pretend to being the greatest democracy in the world, then hey, we are voters. Those in America, who don’t see this, are just some of the (way too big), insular band of fools who need to go back to school, preferably in a country where they can learn about how the rest of humanity lives and little things like international relations, trade, world cultures…

I feel you getting indignant now. Good. Join the club. In your indignancy, please invest some time in getting to know your countrymen and women whose labour and effort made the life you enjoy possible. Of course if you are an out-and-out racist, then you believe slavery and Chinese labour were God-given rights to you - well I just hope you get a knock on the head that saves you from yourself. For the rest of you good people – please work on developing a bit more of a less arrogant  less self-entitled, and more of a ‘judge not, lest thou be judged’ ethos. You are not the only ones who matter. Get out, educate yourself and get to know and understand a few more of the many countries out there in the world that do a much better job of democracy than you do, that have granted, not perfect, but certainly functioning social welfare systems that require high taxes and yet somehow, wow, must be magical, don’t stifle business or people living wealthy, good, happy lives.

You, Trump voters, God help you. You have done a huge injustice to America, her neighbours, the world. You better hope this has the effect of waking up the rest of us and galvanising us into action to set things to right, because, yes, we are also at fault. We were asleep at the wheel it would seem – we let our ‘surrounding ourselves with light’ and our (rightful) pride in the progress we did make, to ironically, cause us to become a bit more like you; blind. We allowed ourselves to believe the tide was turning in favour of humanity and good. Well, you showed us didn’t you!

I, for one, am awake with eyes wide open.

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The Wrongness of Rightness - repost from Sunrainor

"God Rays" photo by Finola, all rights reserved

I'm looking back at some of the over 200 posts I wrote over on Sun, Rain, Or... and I found this one - my second ever post, September 2008. Good recall for a Sunday I think - I still think just like this

It strikes me that a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out who’s right and making sure people know it. Probably just one of those quirks of human nature that either is great at keeping us from paying attention to the glaring probability that the whole human race is pretty much not right, thus allowing mother nature to get on with the tiresome job of getting rid of us while our attention is diverted, or, is it nothing so exciting, just our mundane animal instincts; can’t give up on fighting for territory even if it’s just all in our heads.

Or maybe it’s got to do with our need to figure out what more there is to us than a few fleeting years here on planet earth and our uncomfortableness with admitting that we don’t actually know. There comes religion and the biggest right ‘n’ wrong tug of war there is.

I’m currently reading “The Secret”, living in very close proximity to a Jehovah’s Witness elder, belong to a family of Catholics, and I digest the world’s news daily and today was a slew of religious stories; so that combined with recent hullabaloo about how the mad scientists under the Alps are going to blow us all back to the Big Bang with their particle accelerator, well it’s no wonder I’m thinking about our obsession with being right about those pesky questions – Where did we come from? Why are we here? And by the way, who did this? And what on earth or elsewhere will happen after?

No answers to any of those here folks, sorry. But anyway, it’s not just about being right about religious beliefs – we humans have an insatiable need for righteousness. But for me, I’ve grown more and more towards the belief that when it comes down to it, it often seems that it’s so much more practical to accept that no such absolute exists. Not that I can in any way claim I always achieve such magnanimity myself. But really, let’s not even go into quantum physics where the possibilities become a bigger infinite than I can comprehend, but how can we possibly know the right and wrong of the most of it? There are just so many permutations and combinations within our own households let alone our countries and our world – it just strikes me as a little over important of us to really believe we “alone” have the right way.

I like to take a breath sometimes and put being right aside and see what becomes a possibility that I thought wasn’t there before. Yes, it’s important to be right on occasion – about the answers to the questions on an exam, following the map accurately back from the wilderness adventure, how much baking soda to put in the cake, labelling jars of dangerous liquids, what money you really have in your bank and such, but when it comes to judging a fellow human’s right to their views, their ways, their lives, I feel much more comfortable knowing it’s okay that I can’t possibly always be right. That opens so many more doors to me for discovery, understanding, enjoyment, peace and happiness and leaves me with a lot of energy to put into creating and enjoying the quirks and unexpected gifts of life as we don’t know it.

But just imagine if those burrowing scientists did bring about the end of the world – who would be right then? Or maybe we’re already in a parallel universe and we haven’t yet noticed. 

Ok, so what do you think? How do you view yours or other people's need to know?

Hunter's Moon at Dawn, photo by Finola, all rights reserved