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I went to a funeral last night. My older sister's adopted daughter's second husband died of cirrhosis of the liver in his mid-thirties. I went to support my sister. The rest of them were pretty much strangers to me. He was a drunk and a crack-head and not very lovable as far as I was concerned. He probably robbed most of the people's homes who went to his funeral. My guess is that the other guests were there to support his parents and siblings, and they needed it. Their world is now a safer place.
My sister and her husband couldn't have children because my sister had scarlet fever when we were children, and antibiotics like penicillin hadn't shown up yet in the rural village we lived in then. Her getting scarlet fever was a memorable event. I was six years old and in the first grade of school. The doctors quarantined our home and we couldn't leave the house for what seemed like forever to a kid, but it was only a couple of weeks.
She had repercussions from this disease her whole life. It making her sterile was just one of the symptoms. I don't know much about it. Who wants to talk about that to a blabbermouth like me. I have the deserved reputation of not being able to keep a secret. I don't wanna know any more of their stupid secrets than I can get out of. I know more about people than they know themselves, and I wanna hear the lies they tell themselves to cover up their self-ignorance?
Well, not so much my sister. I actually love her and our siblings. She's the perfect example of what love actually is to me. It's familiarity and has nothing to do with sex. While it may be true in one way that familiarity breeds contempt, it also breeds love as I understand love. I love people I've known for a long time, not because of any particular attributes associated with romantic love or sex. Sexual behavior is something more primeval and different than "love" to me.
Knowing anybody at all a long time requires me to forgive their dumb mistakes to continue to be around them. Just as they have to forgive my dumb mistakes or leave me be. It's not unusual for me to be in love with people I work with everyday for a few weeks. I suffer a little whenever I leave their presence. I mourn because I feel a real loss of some kind. The longer we're around each other the more I miss them. Much of my poetry describes the kind of love that seems too mundane to have invested emotionally in. There have been times I have felt deep shame that I could fall in love so casually over an encounter that was never meant to last long. It seems intentional that I chose to live life as a shamed man (shaman).
The pain of separation I felt from enduring both my divorces nearly killed me. I tried several times to murder myself, but I wasn't very successful or I may have been too much of a coward to actually do what it took to finalize the event. My ex-wives have grown to wish my efforts had killed me. My children probably even more so, but they never knew me well enough to hate the guy who tried to kill himself. They only hate their mother's idea of the guy who deserted them or got deserted by their mother. It's a complicated world. The children it takes a whole village to raise, leave those villages unprepared for life as their parents know it. Shit happens. Things change.
Since the advent of the television media in the Fifties and Sixties, entire villages have retreated from listening to the radio on the front porches and stoops next to the sidewalks, to the sofas and LazyBoy chairs inside of their houses. to where the village's children can't reach out to them without interrupting their favorite sitcom.
Wealthy soccer moms with their SUVs and strict schedules for extra curricular activities not withstanding. They're gonna just hate it when the Tea Party fanatics turn their precious soccer fields into the killing fields on Rush Limbaugh's rabble-rousing orders. Sig heil!! Bitch!
I'm only partially kidding. Genocide can get started with just the sort of dissatisfaction the great unwashed seem to feel these days. There was a documentary on PBS last night about the psychology behind how something like Ruwanda could happen. They had interviews with both the killers and the lucky survivors.
The conclusions from these interviews appeared to be that the conditions for genocide to occur is not enough. It takes the order of a strong man to get it started, but once started, the strong man can't make it stop. Even killing the strong man doesn't stop it once it gets started. Apparently, it becomes an act of nature until it's finally over.
I figure that's what happened to the little people in Ireland. The little people were probably just a race of people like the Bantu pygmies of Africa, the Ainu of Japan, and the Negritos of the Philippines. They were different because they were so small in stature, and eventually gained the reputation of developing magical powers to compensate. They probably accepted this magical attribute without resistance, because it gave them a sense of power over the larger races they wouldn't have without it.
Feigning they had magical powers when they didn't probably got them wiped out genocidally for their troubles. They could ran, but they couldn't hide forever, because their difference in size gave them away. They had to expose themselves to get something to eat. There are only so many places to hide for a long time on an island.
It was chilling to hear one of the Rwandan killers being interview for the documentary relate how they would wake up in the morning, and when the drums started beating, they would go out looking for the tribe members they were killing. They would hunt for them out in the jungles every day for months on end without really understanding why they were doing it. They had no mercy except for offering a quick death over a slow one.
To me, that's what the Tea Party people could become, because it's all about racial prejudice, not the government. I hope I'm wrong, but who knows? I'm human. I'm as gullible as it gets. I could get caught up in such a mob action like anybody else. I might not realize in real time what was going on because I'm always the last to know.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
