Category: The Obama Years

Treading Water

Originally written Friday, February 6, 2015

When we first moved to Vermont, we met a young woman who could manifest things with her mind. She proved it by obtaining a seemingly miraculous array of good things that she genuinely needed but with such rapidity that it felt like magic. Never mind that she was cute, funny, and a veritable damsel in distress. She had mind power!

As much as I wanted to believe that such feats are possible, I knew in my heart that our friend hadn’t manifested with her mind so much as telegraphed her distress. Naturally people flocked to help her. Moreover, her needs weren’t actually that great.

Would that all needs were as simple as a car or an apartment. Those one-offs are easy to manifest. The hard ones are when what you really want is an upgrade of your life.

As it turns out, upgrading your life is a tough goal (although downgrades are easy). Major changes are hard to achieve by any means, including the old fashioned ones like mental effort, strategy, and hard work. You do all the right things, or at least as many of them as you can manage, and still you end up where you started. Is it possible the goal is unattainable? Or is it just that I’m using the wrong means? There are times when you doubt these things.

I’m one of these people who finds life unbearable without a purpose. I can’t do things that seem pointless. It just seems like a waste of time, and for me anyway, time is increasingly precious. But so is money, and that’s where it gets dicey. You find yourself sacrificing time and well-being for money, because (we suppose) money will buy us both. But it doesn’t. Money is a voracious beast. If you make it your goal, it will swallow you whole.

“To chase money or to try to live without it, that is the question.”

I’ve run across a few examples lately of people who have good jobs with high salaries, but who are miserable at work. Since they spend a lot of time working both in and out of the office, this misery follows them around. I’m jealous of their incomes, but what they go through to earn them doesn’t seem worth it. Then I remember that you can be just as miserable and also be broke, and so the argument continues — to chase money or to try to live without it, that is the question.

Obviously, you can’t “live without it” in 21st century America. That’s just silly. But you may have to live on less than you think you need, and that’s a drag. For the middle class, on whom downward trends are acting, the struggle is to stay middle class — to have enough money coming in to keep living more or less as we have been. This is a negative struggle — we are striving not to fall. Unfortunately, trying not to fall is a never-ending battle. It’s hard to gauge success and you’re never sure if it’s safe to stop doing it.

So we tread water in a veritable sea of uncertainty and wait to be rescued, by a change of times or a change of circumstance or even a magical intervention — we aren’t picky. Meanwhile, the need for meaning and purpose becomes subverted when that purpose becomes “staying afloat.” If nothing else, it sucks energy from the better things we could be “manifesting” if only we had our time and well-being back.

Thoughts On Joy

Through the Lens (CC)

Originally written: 10/18/2012

I was thinking about how my cat looks when she first runs outside after a prolonged rain and wondered to myself what feeling she was expressing as she trotted out the door and up the hill. And it occurred to me that the feeling was joy.

As a person, I don’t allow myself to feel too much joy or at least, not outwardly. Joy is a denigrated human emotion, relegated to Christmas songs and negative expressions like “oh joy” when what you really mean is “oh no.” When we see animals or children acting joyfully, we think “how cute.” That’s because about the only expressions of pure joy we regularly see are in animals and small children. Read More

Universal Debt Amnesty — a Solution to Capitalist Endgame?

Bank Run American Union_Bank

Originally written: 7/14/2011

There is much I don’t understand about the world’s economic crisis but what I do get is that everyone owes everyone else and no one has the money to pay it back. That is of course an overstatement, but when you look at it, it does seem that a lot of people are broke — the governments of the world are broke, large swaths of their citizens are broke, non-profits are struggling, and many businesses are hanging by a thread.

Universally, it seems, we are simply out of money. We owe more than we make and we can’t pay our bills. Or at least, not all of them.

The solution to this problem, if the United States Government is any example, is to borrow more money. That’s easy for them to say — they’re the United States Government. Oddly enough, their bond-rating is better if they raise the debt limit and borrow more than if they don’t. I guess being in debt up to your ears to the Chinese is a good thing.

I realize that everything the world over is connected and that if a check bounces in Cinncinnati, it can take out a whole franchise in Taiwan. Or maybe it isn’t that delicate or complicated. Consider this: debt default or no debt default, there will still be 300 million living people in this country, who will still want to get up, breath, eat, work, laugh, and sleep through the night, whether the U.S. raises the debt limit or not.

Which brings me to the solution: universal debt amnesty. Read More

Why We Need To Practice Creative Expression

4/30/2011

For decades now, it’s been impressed on us moderns that art is a frill, unnecessary and usually unaffordable.  This view has always struck me as patently wrong, but I’ve never had a ready answer for it until now.  You can try to explain why art is not a frill, or you can simply answer the question “What would life be like without art?”

If you’re really strict with yourself and strip out every form of art there is, you may start to see what a gift art can be — a gift of joy, beauty, inspiration, and pleasure. Read More

On Personal Sovereignty — Do We Have Any?

12/12/2010

Short answer: no. We no longer have personal sovereignty. What does this mean? It means we are free nowhere. Why does this matter? Well, some would argue that people need freedom to live authentic lives.

What do I mean by freedom? I mean the ability to feel that there is some space in the world to call our own and where we may be openly ourselves without risk of suspicion, intrusion, or fine. We don’t have that anymore.

Let’s look at some examples, kept deliberately general so as not to get caught up in pesky details and starting with where we live. Read More

Putting The People Back Into Democracy

6/29/2010

For a decade now, we’ve been watching the unraveling of nearly every institution in which we the people used to place our faith. One by one they’ve toppled in our esteem, leaving many of us to conclude that most of the institutions that run our world are utterly hollow if not rotten to the core. With this loss of faith in the bastions of society has come a commensurate feeling that the government, which was supposed to protect us from bad institutions, did not always do so, at least in part because government itself is subject to those same institutions.

To recap, first there was Enron and the accountancy scandal, the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, the discovery that the American military practices torture, the scandals in the mortgage and housing markets, and then the lending market generally, ending with the collapse of the entire global economy two years ago. To top it off, Barack Obama, for all that he isn’t George Bush, is not what many people hoped he’d be, and so there is that disappointment. Now, still in the same decade we began, BP is dealing with the reality that they are slowly destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Read More

Is Anyone Else Freaked Out?

Last Judgment By Jan Provoost

Originally posted: 6/1/2010

I was sitting outside with my mother last night, enjoying the gloaming after a pleasant and peaceful Memorial Day barbecue, when it suddenly occurred to both of us to look for the Last Judgement chapters of the Gospels.  We read a passage out of Mark about apocalyptic earthquakes, famine, and destruction — “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.”  I think I just laughed but it was nervous laughter. At no other time in my life have those words sounded so apt for the times.  And that freaked me out

But I was already freaked out.  I had a mini nervous breakdown this weekend, created by a variety of factors —  exhaustion, stress, Gulf oil spill disaster, financial market weirdness, strange storms that take down trees, and probably most of all, the need I’ve felt to continue to carry on with my life as though nothing were happening.

Read More

The Limits Of Capitalism

1/22/2010

My argument, such as it is, is that Capitalism may be good at providing hefty benefits to the few, it’s no good at providing satisfying lives to the many.  And yet it dominates the lives of people worldwide, determining what work we will be able to do, how much we will be able to afford, what things will cost, and by extension, what kind of life we will be able to make for ourselves.  Capitalism is like Calvinism — it causes many things to be predestined.

As the moneys trickling down to the masses dwindles, we’re finding just how pervasive Capitalism is.  Everything we do is predicated on money and since the rules that govern money in America are predicated on Capitalism, we the people are forced to apply Capitalist principles in our lives, whether they really work for us or not.  Read More

Whither The Artist?

10/1/2009

I was musing today on the ongoing boycott of the Jay Leno show and it got me thinking how few avenues there are in modern life for creative people.  For those not in the know, television workers in LA are annoyed that the Leno show will effectively pre-empt five weekly, primetime shows and all the staff that would have been necessary to produce them.  According to the disgruntled, running the Leno show at 10:00 PM  is a cost-cutting measure that allows NBC to replace these five shows — and the artists and technicians employed in creating them — with one host and a skeleton crew. 

Nothing against Leno who is an affable and innocuous guy, but if you assume that it takes 50 to 100 people to produce one original, prime-time hour of television, that’s a lot of creative people who potentially don’t have jobs right now.  Read More

When Is Health Care Reform Not Health Care Reform?

9/18/2009

When is health care reform not healthcare reform?  When it comes on the backs of middle class Americans who already can’t afford it while providing a huge benefit to the very industry that caused the healthcare problem to begin with.

I have been reading along on the healthcare debate, mostly not liking it, and today I read in the Washington Post that there is now concern on Capital Hill that healthcare reform will be too expensive for middle class Americans to afford, especially for the many millions of uninsured.  I have to ask — are they’re just figuring this out? Read More