More Ignorant Prophecy

I just watched an interesting video called Did You Know?. The purported facts revealed in it are staggering for a rurally raised person like myself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDLIwlzkgY

Sure, I've traveled a lot for a person raised in farming communities. I've even been to China. The ship I served on in the Navy was shot at regularly by the Chinese artillery. Although my relations with the Chinese were contained and limited to a very brief time period of just under two years, off and on, it was a relationship of war and sex. That's much more intimate than the non-existant relationship I have with Europe and the Mediterranean countries. I've never been there. I don't feel like I'm lacking.

I think Europe will be caught in the land-locked squeeze between Russia and China. I'm expecting India to invade Pakistan soon. The largest number of human beings I've ever seen gathered in one spot was at a rock and roll festival called The Atlanta Pop Festival, but it wasn't held in Atlanta. South of there near Macon, Georgia. There were 650,000 people there. Many of them naked as a jaybird.

That's not many people. I thought it was, but I was wrong. There are events in India where 10,000,000 people amass together. If either China or India or both started sending out tentacles of humans mimicking army ants and living off the land... they could eat Europe and all the people, animals, and vegetation in it in a fairly short amount of time. Humans are not any different as predators than bacteria that spread like wild fire.

What if the limit of one child per couple was removed for just one year in China or the government failed. Rampant cannibalism. The food supply for so many people would be eaten before it could be cultivated, and then even the seed for a new crop would be eaten, and soon enow, there would not be a single edible plant or animal left on Earth. The only thing left to eat to stay alive would be other people. Even your own young.

It's been written as if true, that Earth is a place where the Gods raise humans as if cattle and now they got a bumper crop. When I think about cows I don't really believe that species of animals know we're raising them to take their off-spring's milk, and then kill them and eat them when they get old and/or sick.

We might not know the Gods are doing the same thing to us no more than the cow knows about our intentions toward it. Consciousness, as Sartre might say, is always OF something. If there is no thing there such as we make them appear through abstraction we can't keep the abstraction for a pet. Abstract constructs need a foundation for being or there's no such thang.

I couldn't stay the child my mother raised so when she got old I wasn't there for her anymore. My mother didn't know me for nearly ten years before she croaked. She just wanted to go home, but she couldn't find it. She discovered the Earth was a carcass, and once done, she couldn't go home again. What wanted to go home was what she left behind. I can't imagine my father wouldn't return for her like his oldest brother came for him.

It's a bit disconcerting for me to realize that I never escaped the way I was raised despite the price I paid to attempt it. My life has no meaning now because there is no "thee" for me. No significant other. Thus, no me-and-thee-ing. A bitter old man living alone with his mistakes... or not.

Not really. Like with the I Ching, the whole world is my oracle now. I don't turn back to the book, and the internet is becoming merely a palette upon which to create the very things that have condemned me to what the end brings clear. I turn any warm body around into the significant other I need for them to be momentarily, as long as I don't ask anything more of them than I would ask of myself. Whatever that means.

I guess I'm writing about meaning, and how the "thee" part of the quotient has expanded beyond what I was taught was the proper and prudent was to conduct my life. I think it's been that way for me for a long time, maybe always. I've probably been accused of treating people like I didn't need them more than any other complaint about me being the way I am is overall.

Sometime I think all I've ever needed from the world for was to get what I needed to be alone. I think that's why I hated my parents AND why I love this saying from the Gospel of Thomas that's got my back on that deal:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

I would have hated anybody who tried to civilized me and helped me to survive in a cruel, cruel world. All I wanted from them was the wherewithal to be alone. I just saw a piece on TV about Cezanne and the influence he had over the artists that followed him. The reason he was able to dedicate himself to his art and not paint to sell was that his parents were rich and sponsored his withdrawal from a greedy society.

Not me. It's only because my parents were not rich that I did it my way. They would have still had to been rich during the Great Depression to have been liberal enough to gimme the dough. If they had gotten filthy rich afterward they would treat me like they did because of what life had taught them.

My father thought the answer to life was to know how to work. If you knew how to work you could get through anything. That's not what he taught his students, most of them were farmer's sons and tenant farmer's sons who already knew how to work. He claimed to have taught them how to think, and he probably did.

I had no idea that children, and in particular male children, rebel against their parents around the age of puberty in a wild attempt to establish their own identity apart from that given to them by their family and caretakers in the communities in which they were raised. I didn't know it was natural and expected by the grown-ups. It made me feel really bad. I may have gotten a little help with that.

If I did, it wasn't necessarily because I needed it. I thought I was tough. I didn't need nobody, and I might go out of my way to prove it with my fists. It wasn't always a last resort either. I told myself I didn't start fights, I ended them. Right? Wrong! The fights I had in my youth were sort of started by me, but having to fight to defend the excuses I used to start them was a failure. I never intended for my sarcasm to end in fisticuffs. I intended for irony to make the impression I wanted to convey instead.

One of the reasons I unsubscribed from the philosophy group was that they insisted on their members remaining impersonal in their efforts to communicate, and because if that I didn't think they were communicating at all. Ostensibly, they seemed to be bragging on the reach of their technical lexicon. They appeared to be headed for the same place using the astrology jargon got me. After I reached a certain proficiency in "talking" astrology, there was nobody who knew enough of the lingo to enjoin me in conversation.

Granted, that's a little like it is working in construction. You get the big money to work yo'self out of a job. There's an end to it. When you finish building some plant to employ people who don't get paid much, it's time to arrange a layoff and start drawing unemployment. Why else would one do public work?

I got real fired up about participating in e-mail discussion groups. I literally thought I could stay home and communicate with like-minded people all over the world. I was right and yet I was wrong. I can communicate with people all over the world, but none of them are like-minded.

I've suspected that all along, but it took e-mail discussion groups to prove it to me in a way I could accept. The concept of projection does that job just fine. People betray the very aspect of themselves they wanna hide from the world by accusing another person of being that way. It's "been the ruin of many a po' boy, and Lord, I know I'm one."

The philosophy group participants were wallowing with people who betrayed themselves through projection. I have somehow lost the desire to show them just what they're doing. It doesn't matter because it wouldn't do any good for them, and just make me look even more like an asshole than I already do. What it is that I am nobody knows... but, I would say that. I just did.

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn about people is that they don't really wanna know that they're betraying only themselves when they accuse other people of having characteristics they have themselves. I base that on the false belief that I want them to tell me I'm betraying myself. I like to think I can take it. Sometimes I welcome that sort of information. Other times it might make me try to think of a way to murder you.

I don't know why I assume that most other people are seekers of truth. It's a stupid attitude to take. What good would it do if they found it? They'd only be accused themselves of being insane. It's not that the knowing the truth would make you insane, it's just that the truth can be very upsetting and pass into insignificance compared to the emotional turmoil it produces.

The real truth of how many wars get started gets buried with the multitude of victims it claims. Does the truth really matter if mass murder results in it's revealing? Doesn't teaching young Muslims that it's their right and duty to kill non-Muslims set them up to end up as victims themselves? Why wouldn't their potential victims kill them first like they would any rabid animal who doesn't need a reason to bite them?

I heard a journalist state on a news program that the world wasn't about to forget that Bush and company perpetrated torture upon the people it incarcerated. Now I'm reading online that Spain intends to bring this up before the World Court. This may wake the people up who supported these atrocities. I've thought about having a little fun teasing the conservatives down to the cafe, but it ain't over until it's over. I might find myself biting the hand that feeds me. Who needs that?