January is the month named after the Greek, the god of two faces, back to back, the god of doorways. Always looking both ways, torn between two ways of doing things, looking forward to the New Year and looking back to the old. He sees the past and the future.
The domestic political fantasy life of the last sixteen years finds us in an unnerving time loop of our own making in this country. Very much on its own, history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good, but as something suspect, dubious or even ungodly, as it was for example in Italy in 1633, when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth was in orbit around the sun.
These past years have produced a prison house of the mind, insidiously endeavoring to promote a fleeting fraudulent terrorist phantom and the darkness of ego. It has produced the degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows.
Our society has mentally transported the rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking, far from the tolerance that came with American religious freedom and the liberty of our conscience.
What is good as opposed to evil? Does it mean the evil of specific terrorist organizations, or the evils of the political cultures from which they came about?
Our civil discourse has morphed into a "civil disguise," something akin to, "I have a great future behind me." People have been restored to passive apathy, while the intellectual language of righteous empire cravenly moves on. Life becomes a constant paradox and the best illusion wins, because we have been taught a lesson-less past, while everywhere we look today we see the price of unchecked power.
Our renewed civil and spiritual discourse must adhere to three basic principles: 1. Facts matter, even if we don't like them. 2. Universal moral principles matter, even if they have consequences we would prefer not to face. 3. Clarity matters, such as distinguishing between terror elements abroad and the republican political culture that breeds it domestically, with tax cuts for the rich and the denial of health care and social services for the general populace.
The word emotion literally means "disturbance." It come from the Latin word emovere, meaning to disturb.
Humans have learned to split the atom and instead of killing 10 or 20 people with a wooden club and now can kill 1 million people by pushing a button. Are we to call that real change?
The pollution of our planet is an outward reflection of our inner psychic pollution, which millions of unconscious people do not take responsibility, for how their inner mind works.
The bond that connects us with other people is the same bond that connects us with the person sitting next to us on the bus, or with a bird, a tree, or a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.
We must again fight off the atavistic forces that our constitution was intended to contain or thwart; the power lust of those who would be king, the greed of those who wish they were aristocrats, and the relentless malice of those priesthoods, such as the craven politics of republicans, that would force their creed on everyone else.
The penalty good men pay for not being interested and emotive in politics, is to be governed by men worse than themselves. Plato.
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