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/

'How Do I Know When I'm In Love?'

Do I need a reason to despise Kaddafi? Do I need a reason to despise anyone - or not despise? Reasons can be countered effectively by other reasons; by clever manipulation of words. In the end, reasons never make much of a difference. One still continues to despise or not despise. It’s like love, or not to love.

Love exists outside the realm of reason. That much has been generally acknowledged. In the film “Of Gods and Men” a young girl asks the old monk, “How do I know when I’m in love?” He answers something to effect that she would not ask the question if she knew it was true. She counters that the man whom her father has chosen for her leaves her unmoved. “Then it isn’t serious,” the old man says.

“Have you ever been in love?” the young girl asks.

“Many times,” the old monk replies after a pause. Finally, he proclaims his love for God and the scene ends.

Words are seldom adequate to capture emotion. Those who seek to imprison their emotions in words alone tend to remain stunted. I’ve always liked Kaddafi as much as I've hated certain U.S. presidents. And I’ve never had a reason to change my mind.

It’s no different with Hillary. I’ve always despised her for her elitism, her indifference; for her opportunism, the way she always calculates for best political advantage. She married for it. (There obviously wasn’t much love.) Then she lied. Then she became a carpetbagger (in New York). She promised New York everything and then broke her promise. Now as Secretary of State she thinks she has found an opening to the top floor, never realizing that she is being used (the same as everybody else). Both Hillary and Petraeus have been given more than enough rope to hang themselves with.

Winner: Obama.

LOVE

Often overlooked, but nevertheless a terrific song by an all-but-forgotten American band. Listen all the way through, I promise it'll be worth your while.

Changing Heart and Minds

Life is a series of circles within circles by which actions are constantly repeated. Logic and teaching seek to encourage the break-up of behavior that is determined to be destructive to self and others. It has been shown that the young are much more receptive to such instruction. Although the very same tendency can be exploited by demagogues to promote endless cycles of doom.

This does not apply strictly to humans. Every Thursday night we keep our car garage closed because we can expect a visit from our local contingent of raccoons who will enter through a garage door left open, jump atop our garbage cans and rock them until they fall over. This will dislodge the lids and the animals can joyfully tear apart the bags and scatter their contents in advance of Friday’s morning pick-up. The rest of the week it’s just fine to keep the garage doors open. Any hunter will confirm my story as it pertains to the wanderings of deer as well.

As it is difficult to break one’s own habits (smoking, blogging, boasting, reading, etc.), it is even more difficult to intervene in the habits of others. How stale is the story of a young woman saying, in all sincerity, that her love alone will suffice to entice her lover to relinquish troublesome or even criminal habits?

This is why in the Middle East changing hearts and minds has always been a tall order. Besides betraying some degree of arrogance, it may well be fundamentally impossible. To stop the raccoons from coming back, we may well have to shoot them (or simply keep the doors closed on Thursdays). To put our nation back on track, we may have to impeach its present leadership. To save Afghanistan, we may have to abandon it. It will fall from within if the circle of distrust, brutality and loathing is allowed to fester beyond the people’s ability to contain it.