But anyone who posits the concept that life can and should be reduced to only self-serving, mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present-day analogs of Auschwitz: the so-called industrial "farming industry"; the practices of deep sea "fishing" by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world's oceans); deep water oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds an analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.
Yet the agenda of the corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction.
Withal, the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement from the very acts that maintain one's culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality. To awaken to reality is to suffer " allowing oneself to experience feelings of despair, powerlessness and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because emotion engenders motion.
If witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party with Adolf Eichmann.
To express indifference or to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like the "good Germans" of the 1930s, you might believe your codified hatreds and commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the state, will deliver and preserve freedom " but these beliefs, maintained by systems of mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold dear.
How can an individual gain a modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own degraded condition?
At this point, the awakening of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don't quite know where you're going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you wander off the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving rationalization -- then, even in moments of doubt and confusion, you can make a home in being lost.
"Show your wounds," exhorted artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us. Pain and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order " to give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.
You can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed. The earth's song, at this juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence. This song needs you to lend your voice.
And I submit this lyric as the song's refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts of our men and woman uniformed in blue: "Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. Visit Phil's website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100000711907499
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