Saturday, April 16, 2011

Blowing Up Bridges

It’s on! The trash talking has begun. And make no mistake, it’s being encouraged by the White House. Expect one of the dirtiest campaigns in recent history.

We are all the same. It should be easy to find common ground. It is not. Enter ideology. Ideology forces us into templates that do not fit well. It tends to pervert our true natures - to live and let live - and puts the accent on confrontation. This is generally needed in times of war - in the face of threat. In peacetime it seems a silly way to behave.

Since Barack Hussein Obama has been in office, there has been no peace. It’s almost as if, while we were living our lives, draft notices began arriving in the mail. We’ve been forced to take sides - one side being America.

Obama is a warrior alright, even if Libya doesn’t quite speak to the issue. Warriors do not compromise. They dismiss the broad range of the painter’s palette and divide the world into black and white. Again, this is only appropriate to war.

“You’re either for us, or against us.” No shades of gray even.

Who is POTUS fighting? America, of course. This has been hard for Americans to swallow. They thought he was on their side.

Similarly, it’s been difficult to square POTUS’ color scheme. The white hats have traditionally been ‘good’; the black hats, ‘bad‘. We’ve been taught this from watching John Wayne westerns. POTUS is black and tells us he’s white - while he paints us black as sin.

Something does not add up here. We’ve known it from the start. Now we’re starting to feel uncomfortable with it. We read about the soldiers in Syria who are refusing to shoot protesters being shot by their own - the worst of all fates. We wonder about how the term ‘conscientious objector’ might fare in this climate.

Voting for a black president was supposed to solve all this. We thought it would bridge the eternal divide. Instead, we find the existing bridges blown up and not enough shovel-ready jobs to build new ones. Sources tell us that China is building bridges like crazy - while we are tearing ours down. Some of us are trapped behind enemy lines.

Carlos Castaneda tells us that each life represents a complete, self-contained universe; that two people standing side by side must be seen as two such universes; that these cannot be commingled, except by event affecting both. Ideology disregards the deeper meaning of this lesson. It seeks to bridge chasms (that cannot be bridged) by hostile rhetoric, fomenting non-existent threat and, finally, by outright aggression. Thereby, the individual is lost and replaced by ordinance.

Love lost in the ashes of ritual (s)laughter.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

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