"Freedom Isn't Free"

The title is a well-worn phrase used by a retired military officer and gentleman that I know. He uses this phrase every Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day. He uses this phrase when military remains from foreign wars are returned to U.S. soil. He uses this phrase whenever he is commemorating the passing of a colleague or commanding officer. My friend is fourth or fifth (maybe even sixth) generation U.S. Army, second generation Special Forces (his dad was a member of the very first SF unit), in addition to which he has served in emergency management, is a historian, and a musician with a fine baritone voice and a huge repertoire of songs from what you’d call the Great American Song Book (everything from sea shanties to Oregon Trail, Westward Expansion, military and cowboy songs, etc.). Like all of the fine military folk that I have known, he is unfailingly kind to every person and ever at the ready to help fellow citizens, family and friends, be they near or far.

 

“Freedom isn’t free.”

 

I write this commentary from semi-lockdown in my home during a pandemic that threatens the lives of millions, in this country and abroad. Fortunate I have been to be a temporary worker in a county social services agency when the crisis hit. I have been able to continue to work, as my work was categorized as “essential.” We are managing. My colleagues and extended family in the music world, to a great extend, have suffered financially during the lockdown. So many legions of others, in various walks of life, all over the world, continue to suffer under the necessary privation that this health threat continues to pose. For those in the very lowest income brackets, daily life is a test that seems helpless and hopeless.

 

In the wake of the 2020 U.S. election, in which the incumbent has been decisively defeated (according to the electoral college vote count), there is grave uncertainty: The incumbent is unwilling to concede, claiming that the election was systemically fraudulent without providing any evidence, and is fanning seditious flames among his fans and followers, while stepping away, largely, from the growing needs of the yawning crises (of which the pandemic is only one) and his duty to the people he was elected to serve. The people he was elected, in 2016, to serve are the people of our nation. All of the People. He was elected to serve us.

 

Well, yes, we have been served. We have been served sarcasm, lies (in the thousands), contempt, nepotism, pocket-lining, money-laundering, influence peddling, a long list of rights continue to be hobbled, and the rollbacks of protections (physical and environmental) continue… In short, within the span of three and a half years, we have been served up a litany of woe. Eric Alterman, writing for The Nation, says: “[W]e must also grapple, sooner rather than later, with the heart of darkness in this country that has inspired tens of millions of fellow citizens to support this evil miscreant.”

 

If you look closely at the election results, both from 2016 and 2020, it is evident that these races have been close. What is the divide? I will make the most obvious and facile divide; the country is divided between rural matters and city matters. Note: I did not say “red state/blue state;” that is one of the most false equivalencies, ever, next to “North/South.” What we face in this country is a two-economy system, both of which are underserved by so-called “free market” capitalism. We could find more adequate names for these two systems, but for now I will call them, “Town-mouse” and “Country-mouse,” evoking characters from a story by Beatrix Potter. The reason I choose these names is to clarify that what we face a culture conflict, one that is actively primed by political elites, on “both sides of the aisle,” in order to consolidate power and pork, to divide and rule, and – most importantly – to under-serve and under-represent their constituents.

 

This is the story of the city-folk pitted against the country-folk. Never would I given this much thought, had I not be queried by a young, gen-Z coworker, who saw me engaged in reading on my lunch break. He was curious; what was it that captivated me so? Actually that particular book was philosophy, specifically an historical exploration of subjectivity, beginning with the rise and development of various schools of philosophy extant in the first and second centuries. (This may seem like minutiae unrelated to my commentary, but it is not.) 

 

My young friend’s interest was piqued. “Could I read it when you’re done?” 

 

What could warm a book maven’s heart more?!

 

Well, I came back the next day with several books, including two books of essays by Wendell Berry. Perhaps best known to American readers as the author of the poem, The Peace of Wild Things, Mr. Berry, who hails from rural Kentucky, is a farmer, an activist, a poet, a teacher and – although it does not say so on his Wikipedia page, a philosopher– and I would posit that he is one of this country’s pre-eminent philosophers. My co-worker read Berry’s The Way of Ignorance, and then we talked about it a bit. He said, “Well, there was a lot of farming jargon in there, stuff that I didn’t understand. But, I sort of skipped over the terminology, and once I got into what he was saying, I was, like, yeah. It made me think about things differently. I mean, I’m an inner-city kid, and I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be in the country, and what the issues are that people face, there.”

 

And there it was, in a nutshell. He got it. This is the crux of the matter, the heart of our national existential crisis. 

 

Since the dawn of the industrial age, our nation has increasingly been divided by city issues versus rural issues. As population growth caused cities to spill over into suburbs and industry to infringe on the wild places, increasingly, our politics has certainly become “us vs. them.” In part, I think people have put unfounded faith in their elected representatives. The electorate has been trained to believe that their elected representatives are really working on their behalf – that is, that they are truly representing the desires and needs of the people who elected them to office. 

 

Average citizens forget that industry lobbyists have a lot of money to grease the wheels of what capitalism wants. Whether we live in the city or the countryside, you and I do not have that kind of influence; as a result, our needs are left wanting. Oh, there’ll be a carrot dangled near election time, but once the election is over, the carrot evaporates into thin air. Meanwhile, if policy is made that people don’t want, the excuses fly, the fingers point, and those on the “other side of the aisle” become scapegoats. But, trust me, the scapegoats are a fiction .

 

We have a two-house legislative branch that is supposed to serve the people.  There are always claims of a shadow government. Yes, I believe there is a shadow government, and that shadow government is called capitalism. Capitalists always have millions of dollars to throw around, in order to get to the head of the line in terms of service, but they never seem to have the money to pay you or taxes. Billions of capitalist lobbying dollars are spent in order to do the wrong things for the economy of the people. I’ve said for decades that if we just paid average people what they were worth and gave them access to healthcare and services that are based on actual cost of living indices for each region, it would be less costly than all the lobby money poured forth to keep people from such. If there were to be an equitable system of government, we should get rid of the lobbyists, shouldn’t we? Instead, we have enshrined them in a law that states a corporation is a person. Well, actually, We the People did not do that, but our shadow government did, with the help of your elected representatives and the Supreme Court! 

 

We are manipulated by our shadow government (capitalism) into thinking “other” is the problem. Some of our representatives are career politicians who know all to well where their bread is buttered; these folks are millionaires. How did they amass such fortunes on government pay? This is an old story, but somehow, we don’t want to take at the face value what is thrust at us every single day in the news cycle by a person who has no values beyond “me, myself and I.” 

 

But we are irresponsible if we abrogate our duty as citizens to be for each other. One of those duties is to respect the rights of others. I’ve seen so much bashing and smashing and slamming in the media that I am bruised by it. Are you feeling the same thing? 

 

There is an economy that is good for Town-mice, and there is an economy that is good for Country-mice; both need to be honored and served. That we have been taught to believe – and some of us actually do believe – that some are better than others, that some do not deserve to be treated equally, this is a moral outrage and crime that must end. 

 

Freedom isn’t free. I need you and you need me. 

 

Right now, we’re all spitting and clawing at each other, and not just lobbing pejoratives (such as “libtard” or “ever-trumper”), which is bad enough. My brothers and sisters on the left are just as apt to be in an echo chamber as my brothers and sisters on the right. Mutual disrespect is rampant. The right to peaceably assemble is being trampled by extremists of all stripes. Crimes are being committed unabashedly. Law enforcement is trigger-happy; as one victim’s mother put it, “We called the police for help, not for an execution!” People are not being given due process. Racism has gone from undercurrent to in your face. The hydra of rabble-rousers that follows the peaceful protests grows, in turn followed closely by opportunistic looters. I see reckless abandon and mutual disregard, everywhere. The trash dumped by the side of the road is a message that says, “I don’t care!”

 

Where is our national moral compass? Where has it gone?

 

Never has its lack been more evident than during this pandemic, where people cry “my rights! my rights are being infringed!” when they refuse to adhere to the most basic health and hygiene guidelines. Is it really so constraining to wear a mask or to wash your hands? The news is full of stories and the hospitals are filling with people who have declared the right to flagrantly disregard health directives and put others, as well as themselves, in danger. Some, sadly, have gone to their graves. Humans really haven’t evolved much since the pandemic of 1917; the same grievances were aired then.

 

Well, guess what, folks? We live in a collectivist society. The old adage (difficult to attribute) reads, “Your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.” An individual is not a self-sufficient island, completely free to act at will. This is what we as a society fail, time and again, to understand, to equitably legislate, and to live. 

 

FREEDOM ISN’T FREE! 

 

Freedom is not a ticket to a free-for-all, do-whatever-you-want lifestyle. Freedom is where we hold ourselves and each other accountable to the ideals laid out in the Constitution. Freedom is responsibility to self and to other. 

 

As a nation, we need to gather together around this truism that Freedom Isn’t Free. We need to understand the costs of discipleship to what has been unprincipled, and the heavy cost of deceit. We need to have some difficult conversations about economies – those that are good for Town-mice and those that are good for Country-mice. Repairs are needed. We need to legislate in ways that make sense, not money. We need to mend our nation In the end, it is not “us versus them,” is it?  

 

We ultimately all want the same economy: worthy work, decent pay, sufficient food, adequate shelter in a nice setting, clean water, access to healthcare and protection against criminal activity or invasion. There are costs for all of this. We need to recognize those costs and be willing to share them. 

Anything less is un-American.

  

This is It - Episode 12: On Virtue

One of the students asked him to define virtue.

He thought for a moment. After all, this is everything he had spoken of, in different ways, for weeks. Some heard and understood; he had seen that this was true. Some people were new to the group of followers. Patience, he realized, was a primary virtue that he must continue to practice. 

But this is what he told the students: 

I’ll repeat: Woe to this world filled with stumbling blocks and snares. It is enough that they exist in the natural world, but cursed is the person who creates them to harm or limit another person from doing what they perceive to be the right thing, in any given moment. 

If you fall out with a friend or relative, do whatever it takes to make up. Pay all debts you owe and cancel the debts owed to you.

One student pressed him, What good must I do to have eternal life?

And he said, Why do you ask about what is ‘good’? Why is the word ‘must’ in your question? There is only one sense of good, that done without question or obligation. If you want to fully enter life, observe the commandments.

One young man asked, Which ones?

And Yeshua said, Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not give false testimony; honor your father and mother; care for your neighbor as you care for yourself.

The young man said, I have done all these things. What am I missing?

And Yeshua answered, To be perfect, sell all you have, leave everything behind, and come with me. You cannot enter into life encumbered by obligation to things. Those obliged to love things are beholden neither to other people nor to the holy one.

The young man turned and walked away, for he was encumbered by wealth.

Yeshua was saddened, but did not stop him. As the young man walked away, Yeshua said, It is difficult for the rich to enter into life. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to carry their wealth and reputation with them through the narrow door that leads to life.

Whatever is bound in life is bound everywhere. Whatever is freed in life is freed everywhere. 

© 2020 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

A brief note about my literary exploration of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth: I have undertaken this exercise having read, sung (in several languages), meditated and prayed on the contents of the Synoptic Gospels (as well as the Non-Synoptic Gospels) for at least 45 years. In that time, I’ve accumulated a bit of a library (which comes as no surprise to those who know me), and I try to follow modern scholarship. Here is a partial list of the authors and books that come to mind as I write these episodes:

Ballentine, Debra Scoggins, The Conflict Myth & the Biblical Tradition; Oxford University Press 2015

Erdman, Bart, various titles

Gaus, Andy, The Unvarnished New Testament; Phanes Press, 1991

Herzog, William R., Parables as Subversive Speech; Westminster John Knox Press, 1991

Louden, Bruce, Greek Myth and the Bible; Routledge, 2019

Tatian, Diatesseron; www.earlychristianwritings.com/diatessaron.html

Wajdenbaum, Philippe, Argonauts of the Desert, Routledge, 2011

Ward, Keith, The Philosopher and the Gospels, Lion Hudson, 2011

Yosef ben Maityahu (Titus Flavius Josephus), various writings

Decoration Day

“Oh, say,”

the song begins,
as cortege follows caisson
to the altar of the vacant chair,
“Can you see?”

The band, impeccably uniformed,
follows, slow of cadence,
to offer last rites
for the flag-draped remains
of those days of yore and gore,
of that cause that is no more.

“What so proudly we hailed,”
at the blood-soaked field of battle,
where vegetation has at last returned,
and the songs of birds redeem all
that has been forgotten of the promises
of life, of freedom and of happiness.

“If a foe from within strike,”
few remember these lines,
“down, Down with the traitor
that dares to defile,”
over cans of beer and burnt flesh,
the memory of bands of brothers
and sisters, lost to time and tide.

“By the millions unchained”
to most blessed eternal silence,
“who our birthright we have gained,”
and then lost whilst a fool bargained
arms to nations, for the waging of more wars,
and dictated malfeasance
on “the home of the brave.”

“Can you see?”
The graves lie deep
beneath their heavy stones
and, even flower-bedecked,
unseasonal rains flow over them as tears,
to mourn the dead and the destitute living,
a reminder of our ultimate failure:
War did not vanquish war.

© 2019 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

//

In 1861, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in reaction to civil war engagement, wrote this verse to the “Star-Spangled Banner” – which appeared in songbooks of the era:

“When our land is illumined with Liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strike a blow at her glory,
Down, down with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By millions unchained, who our birthright have gained,
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.”

Critter Whisperer

Mother’s Day, 2017.

A concert  of Renaissance music, composed by women.

Scene: Intermission, obligatory bathroom break.

Dramatis personae: Portative Organist, Singer, Moth

One enters the restroom, embedded in the building of the campus. A beautiful big moth is fluttering there, having already entered by means of some slipstream of air, from outer to inner. One relieves an urgent call, washes and dries. Yet, the fluttery flapping continues.

One knows the beautiful moth will die if it continues to be trapped within the restroom.

The Portative Organist enters the restroom. Oh, gosh. One thought to try to capture the moth, but the presence of another person makes such a venture an Admission of Oddness.

One says to oneself, “Okay, just this once.”

And then, One's thought speaks to the Moth, “Let me catch you,” while waving wildly with One’s hands. Fortunately, the Portative Organist has entered a stall and shut the door. Maybe she won’t think you are a crazy nutcase.

“Come to me, Moth,” actually speaking the words aloud, while flailing your hands toward the creature, in “capture mode.”

Miracle! The Moth lands on your hand!!!!

“Stay,” One says, while slowly opening the door to the hall and slowly stepping down toward the exit to The Great Outdoors. "Stay." The small creature listens, perhaps...

But then, nerves intervene and worries, and the wings begin to beat.

“NO! Stay!!!” The tiny feet affix themselves once again, and a small tongue comes out to touch a caring and anxious flesh. “Stay!” The larger body hazards to step forward, slowly, followed by more steps to THE DOOR.

Slowly, One opens the door. (With recent days of high wind, One does not want the small charge to be blown back into the building.) One extends the hand bearing the small creature out into the sun shot air.

“Go, you are Free!”

But, the creature stays, fixed to One’s hand!

“Go, you are FREE!”

The tiny tongue comes out, offering another kiss, and the creature still clings.  But the intermission is coming to a close…

“Please, Dear, you must GO!” And, of course, the Portative Organist is leaving the restroom, but what is dignity?

One last kiss of the sweet and tiny tongue, and then, “You must, must go!” And I blow my small charge from my hand, into the breezy sunshine.

The moth flies to greet the afternoon.

One returns to the call of music, to the concert program.

But, a once trapped moth flies free.

All About Making Waves

MYSTERY CYCLE
V. Making Waves

                   for Emily and Ian and their Dad – 20 October 2000

It’s your turn,
a heavenly voice said,
then a tremendous tickle ran out through the clouds,
followed by jiggling rolls escaping into snickers,
and pealing positively gales on gales of giggles
until, finally, there wasn’t anything for it,
and the clouds burst into laughter,
what you call rain.

Drop upon drop,
from small to large, both young and old,
they all fell down akimbo,
tumbling from the sky,
collecting, drunkenly you might say,
in puddles to pools to rivulets to streams,
finally running like great silver ribbons to the sea.

I can’t remember,
One asked an-Other, still giggling the tickle,
I say, what was the joke?
but Any-one would have been too wet to answer,
though really No-one heard clearly enough to say,
and Every-one was wondering what would happen next,
so, if there was a reply, who could say if it was made,
and whether by Which-one,
or not?

But Some-one was able to hold the thought long enough
and, floating up through the lovely bubbles to the surface,
called out to friend Sky for the answer.

A, Darling, did they not tell you long ago?
It’s your turn to have fun!

They gather you all up into their arms,
lulling you with sweetest windsongs
from all the Four Corners of existence,
and when it is your time,
they shake you loose
to join the great throng,
so you can be free.

But what shall we do?
asked the littlest drop.

Moon shimmered a silken answer:
Dearest, anything you do will make me smile,
but why don’t you make me some waves?

So, laughing and shoving all the more,
fumbling and recklessly tumbling,
all heels over heads toward the shores
and to the utter delight of all,
they did.

Reprinted from
“Songs of A Soul Journey” by Elisabeth T. Eliassen © 2002 all rights reserved.

It has been a rainy year, and so, on this anniversary of the birth of my twins, Emily and Ian, I bring you the message that life is wild, wet, wooly, weird and wonderful. Punctuated by hard times, yes; but even so, still the best game in town.

I, who declared at the age of 12 or so that I would never have children, gave birth to twins on this day, 17 years ago -- which is to say that one can make all the bold pronouncements one likes, but the cosmos has other ideas... 

From wombmates to roommates to housemates, they have shared so much with us and each other… 

So, to Emily and Ian, (and to all of you) I say:

Keep jiggling the rolls and giggling the tickles, 

because it’s your turn to have fun;

it's all about making waves!

~ love,

Mom

Sea Swings

Gravity weighs;

whether from weight 
of losses, resulting
in masses,
or the forces
that must be exerted
carrying the daily load,
gravity weighs.

Have a seat!
Let your feet dangle,
Hang like a puppet suspended,
and Take a load off,

While the column rises
to meet the leeward breeze,
and we wait with anticipation.

Slowly, even as we rise,
the rotation begins,
and our feet swish
through the bracing air.

The column head tilts rakishly,
as we fly through the air;
gulls sail by, looking us in the eye,
and we sail with them.

As we rise up,
all our thoughts,
our hearts and delights
come along for the ride.

Together, all rise
in shared boundlessness,
until the ride subsides.

Gravity weighs less
when centripetal force
unites us centrally
in moving straight ahead.

Gravity weighs less,
and tension, too,
when they can make us fly,
and do.

© 2015 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Meditations in Fast Times: 38. We all walk this path

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                38.

We all walk this path,
The blood in our veins dances
As we follow the stars;
Each pattern is a math
Of blind schemes and chances,
Of discovery solely ours.

We seek the still,
Where at the still point
There might be peace
Within which to find will
To withstand all disappoint,
To accept a final cease.

Where have we been?
It is difficult to say;
Perhaps we are the place
Where there is no sin,
Only experience may
Mark our path and face.

We watch one we love
Ascend the final tree;
Sacrifice does not mar
The healing of the Dove,
It is here for all to see,
Being reconciled to the Star.

Freedom and release,
Both time and timeless,
Past and future join now,
Where the only timepiece,
Is being, explicitly ceaseless
—Only truth hangs from the bough.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

To Free The Soul

Open wide the gates,
filling the vast interior
with whatever inspirations
are eager to be
and be beyond.

Embrace equally the visible
as well as the invisible,
so the song of You
that loves to fly
will be multidimensional.

Digest every lesson
in your composition,
reaching for what is good
of all available beauty;
this makes harmony inevitable.

They say "leave no trace",
but I say "carry your song,
deliver it often and long";
transition once complete,
dawn will glow of your smiling face.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Involuntary Controls

Golden strands of light glide

off the salty soup of the sea;
while birds revel in flight,
calling out hellos to me,
wildflowers reach out to touch.

I look out from my thoughts,
these distractions welcome.

As I walk bayside along,
I am reminded of the sun,
of wild grasses and birds,
of sand and sea, of joys
that cannot be measured
by worth or priority, but
just because they are;
here I am among them
with no appropriate response.

This is all free, in a way
that I am not, nor can ever be;
choose my way as I will,
this parallel dimension
will tolerate my presence,
but not be fed by my music.

I now see our world,
of unmeshed constructs
and unleashed powers,
as an untamed world apart.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

(Reflections for Earth Day)

Social Contact or Social Contract? Thoughts on 9/11

There could have been many titles for this entry, but this is the title I ended up with.

This blog has been quiet for a week, as I took some time for reflection on life, on tragedy, on love and the notion of an everlasting.

I remember exactly where I was on September 11, 2001.

Just the day before, my entire family had traveled home from Seattle by plane, following a cruise to Alaska, the kind of trip none of us had ever taken before. During the cruise, a horrible virus ran its way through the passenger list, and I had been hit hard by it at the end of the journey, while our toddlers suffered mild cases of seasickness. Despite these things, we had all had a wonderful time, but we had returned home late at night, and I was very ill by then.

The next morning, my husband was feeding the children when a phone call came. When he got of the phone, he turned on the television to see the news. He called to me from downstairs and said I needed to come right away, as something very important and very disturbing had happened and the happening was actually still in progress. The repeating loop of the collapsing towers made me dizzy. I reeled back up the stairs to my sickbed and said, “turn it off.” I could not think or breathe.

We all know what that event was, and we have been beating our breasts over it ever since. Arguably, this event galvanized Americans like no other event since the Civil War. It has been ten years, and we still vent pain, rage and sorrow over what took place. We want to lay blame, but I conclude that the blame has mostly been laid in the wrong hands.

We ourselves are to blame.

As a nation, we have traded the national treasure of our ideals in equality for a complacency that looks the other way when it comes to real social justice and equity. We have put our trust in leaders who are just plain crazy and obviously out for all that they can amass for themselves themselves. The leaders have been bought off by huge megalocorporate business entities that promote societal mores of greed and worship of money. The megalocorporate god giveth jobs and then taketh them away when no one is looking, or hideth them from certain kinds of candidates or offshore them. We thought they were working for us, because we are their people and they are our megalocorporations. Little did we know that we were being sold up and sold out, just as is happening nearly every nation in the so-called “third world.”

The worship of money and power is home to roost, and it did not start with that fateful day of September 11, 2001, but it has been a thread embroidered in our national policy, foreign and domestic, for well over fifty years. It started well before Eisenhower’s warnings about the consequences of the military industrial complex, and before WWII. This is a fatal flaw that was seeded well before 1900, 1860, 1770 or even 1492. Indeed, the flaw has existed since before the fall of Rome, before the repatriation of the Jews, before the events detailed in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

George Steiner writes—and these words were penned in those days before 9/11:

Inhumanity is, so far as we have historical evidence, perennial. There have been no utopias, no communities of justice or forgiveness. Our current alarms—at the violence in our streets, at the famines in the so-called third world, at regressions into barbaric ethnic conflicts, at the possibility of pandemic disease—must be seen against the background of a quite exceptional moment. Roughly from the time of Waterloo to that of the massacres on the Western Front in 1915-16, the European bourgeousie experienced a privileged season, an armistice with history. Underwritten by the exploitation of industrial labour at home and colonial rule abroad, Europeans knew a century of progress, of liberal dispensations, of reasonable hope. It is in the afterglow, no doubt idealized, of this exceptional calendar—not the constant comparison of the years prior to August 1914 with a “long summer”—that we suffer our present discomforts.

There has never been an earthly utopia, and we cannot pretend that, as modern Americans, that we are color-blind and truly act with justice and fairness toward all. It is not human nature to be so, and I doubt that the human race can evolve beyond its brutish nature. Is there moral high ground for allowing our own people to be illiterate, unemployed and homeless? How can we talk about leaders in other countries who allow such realities on their own turf?

The events of September 11, 2001 are still unfolding. We cannot claim the role of virtuous victim for those events, neither can we justify those aspects that continue to unfold daily. In our name, our government has done terrible things, including arming our enemies to act against us. Islamoterrorism was created by our government, moving pawns over its giant chessboard.

Our government set this horror in motion. We have allowed our government to do terrible things. We are responsible.

We have all been taught that we have the right to say and do anything we want, and so everyone does, with little or no thought as to consequences. And then we are shocked when something goes too far or the consequences become too great.

People have been taught to talk themselves silly, and they do. Conversely, people not been taught to listen or to hear, or to critically think about their individual choices. The quiet of circumspection is missing from our daily lives.

We have bought into the myth of privilege and elitism. We have bought the lie that we are entitled.

Healing can only come once we understand our individual roles in this great tragedy that is our world. Healing can only come when we agree renew and actually live a social contract, rather than wring our hands and obsess over our social networking and ever-present media.

Healing can only begin when we address the following questions:

What is enough? When is enough enough?

Goethe was a brilliant thinker. And he was being brutally candid when he said:

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

As we remember September 11^th, may all that is Divine rain down peace on all who have been touched by violence and all of us who are left to face the events that continue to unfold.

For, those events are still unfolding.

Smurfs or Serfs?

The digital electronic age seems to have reduced interactions and conversations either to cute quips or punchy invective. As a result, human beings seem less connected and more isolated, not to mention more misanthropic, as the days wear on. It is more the rule than the exception to see parents and children, at restaurants and other public places, interacting with video games or text messaging, rather than with one another. Small gangs of youth roam the streets, seemingly as social packs, but they are all glued to their individual gizmos. One wonders what holds such groups together. Professional people go to meetings, but rather than pay attention to the facilitators, they do a lap dance with their cell phones, texting jokes and nasty comments; everyone is committed to being a comedian. Studies have been done that show people to be spending less time than ever doing actual work, all because they allow themselves to be distracted by internet shopping, gaming, social media and the like.

It is a wonder the world still goes round.

Is it possible that all this distraction figures into the monumental dysfunction we seem to be treated to at the highest levels of government? Well, personally, I think that there have been too many mini-scandals involving men in public office, cell phone photos and Twitter. It is a wonder that any business gets done in the House and Senate, not to mention in state and local government. Certainly, we see less action to inform or shape or protect “We the people” than to effect stalemates, whereby no progress can be made in any direction, unless it serves big business.

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution reads:

We, the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Which of the important words in that preamble have been adhered to and supported in during the recent US debt ceiling crisis? Easier to list the words that do not correspond in regard to recent decisions:  Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, Blessings, Liberty, Posterity do not figure into most of the decisions made recently, but maybe in little ways for as long as the 50 years since Eisenhower’s speech about the Military Industrial Complex.

No Union: our states are color-coded and many now do not welcome outsiders. Some states even take pride in their prejudices and racism. People bicker about so many little things that no one has time or energy left to have real discourse about the big issues. Much energy is placed in obfuscating the truth about issues and in vilifying people who are seeking the truth, but less energy is placed in thinking and action that leads to improving everyday living for all people.

No Justice: particularly if you are a person of color, have gender issues, or are a woman of child bearing years or a child or are an elderly person of any identity whatsoever and unless you have money to pay for high-powered attorneys, unless you can spend hours doing the rounds of the circuitous phone systems at government offices or their privatized fee and penalty collection agencies, at banks, credit card, health care and insurance companies, you are likely to be cheated many times in your life by people and institutions that believe themselves to have no responsibility and no accountability to the public.

No Tranquility: There is a war going on at home, and you can actually see it and hear it happening all day long in most communities. Impotent anger rages in the streets among the disenfranchised, disadvantaged, disillusioned, disjointed, jobless, and yes, also among the most average, even law abiding of us. Fear is taught from the highest levels of government to the lowest villager. Fear makes people uneasy, disinclined to share, likely to guard an “us against them” attitude. Big Business teaches that cheating and chiseling are the best and most ready ways to achieve success, and so it is really no wonder that our jails are full and that we cannot fully trust our neighbors as we might like. We are given so many choices that are non-choices, it is a wonder we can make any decisions at all. Electronics were supposed to make life easier, but because they all have proprietary systems and cords and software to negotiate, we lose hours in frustration and troubleshooting. Cellular phones are a mixed blessing: the lag time of voices has us yelling “what?” to one another, if we try to talk at a normal pace; coverage is not always available; messages get lost in black holes, only to appear in the voicemail box weeks later. Add to these complaints the constant hum of electronic devices, the blaring and thumping of music from cars and pumped into restaurants, loud and unguarded cell phone conversations, the angry chorus of leaf blowers on any given day of the week, and the sum is a complete absence of tranquility. Is it any wonder that we retreat to the solace of mindless television, iPod earbuds and comfort foods guaranteed to lead to auto-immune diseases, adult onset diabetes or morbid obesity?

No Welfare: We are constantly told that we must fend for ourselves, that we’re on our own, and that we don’t deserve to benefit from government programs, especially not if we have paid into them for years. Our public schoolteachers are styled by lobbyists and lawmakers as being gold diggers. Our unionized workers are vilified for asking for decent wages and benefits. Basic healthcare is described as being too expensive for a national health program to sustain. The liberal arts programs are being dismantled from our universities—being replaced by Research and Development that benefits companies, not people; graduate students provide cheap or free labor to corporations that will make billions of dollars from their hard work. Museums, music programs, elder care, family planning, jobs training, national parks, all of these and more are threatened because we are told that they are too expensive. The beast of government is being starved “for our own good” so that we will be more freed than ever to spend money we don’t have, and no one is minding the store to see that transactions are legal or fair.

Fewer Blessings: It becomes more and more difficult to count the blessings realized as a result of our Constitution and harder to see a National practice of humanist personhood.

Strange Liberty:  Women are not free from discrimination or free to decide their own sexual health, and they do not get paid at the same level as males. Partnered gays, lesbians and transgender people are mostly not allowed marriage (although this is slowly changing for the better) and other rights that married heterosexual couples share. Consumers are not free to dodge taxes and regulations like corporations can and do. The public has license to spend liberally, but with no guarantee that the products they purchase have been fully tested and are safe to use. Racial and religious and other bases of discrimination are practiced everyday in this country, even though it is against the law—this is apparently a liberty. The banks are free to interpret what truth in lending means. Insurance companies are free to deny coverage. There is a lot of free information available on the internet, but fees must be paid for the most reliable information. Public employees and officials feel free to act like complete doofuses and dolts, with impunity.

Posterity: Living for the moment seems all the rage. The reason to preserve such things as resources, education, national parks, cultural heritage, historical buildings and institutions that provide services, food, jobs, hard and soft goods and joy would be so that these could be available for future generations to enjoy. Our government tells us that it costs too much to preserve a quality of and dignity to life even for a single day, but that we should instead spend any amount of money for instruments and soldiers of death, these to be used against other people in other countries, people who should have rights, just as we should have rights, in the name of freedom. Where is the posterity in that?

This brings us to the one that was not listed…

Defense: Not for the mother, the child, the elder, the weak, the infirm, the destitute, the disabled, the naked, the friendless, the isolated, the ill or the hungry, but for the right of unaccountable capitalist enterprise to take advantage of all of these, everywhere in the world. The slaughter of innocents by means of carpet bombing and attack drones, mainly in the support of rapacious corporate greed is bad enough, but death by indifference is even more egregious—especially against our own nationals, on our own soil.

$$$

The little blue Smurfs are back! The movie is in theaters now. I am sure that, being a mother of two children, I will have to see it.

Most people don’t remember too much about the Smurfs’ history or their way of life, within their cartoon villages, populated with mushroom-shaped houses. The Smurf way is defined by sharing and cooperation, and place. By place, I mean that every individual has a valid contribution to make toward the maintenance of Smurf lifestyle, and service is rewarded not with money, but with the necessities of life, as well as a certain assurance of dignity.

This, of course, sounds highly political, not to say utopian, and smacks of the ugly term communism—but, of course, there has never, ever been any communist government in any country on the face of the earth, not ever. Neither communism nor socialism has never existed. What historically has actually existed, erroneously labeled as communism or socialism, is something called authoritarian socialism, which is to say military dictatorship, which is to say anti-humanist slavery.

The Belgian creator of the Smurfs, the cartoonist Peyo, was by all accounts apolitical.

Smurf rhymes with Serf!  How funny! What would Smurfdom have in common with Serfdom? Well, the answer is, of course, nothing.

Feudalism has been dead for a long time, now, hasn’t it?

The wealthiest in our country do not pay taxes and their funds are sheltered in banks offshore. Our government refuses to make taxation equitable for the average wage earner, or to protect average wager earners from being taken advantage of in the marketplace. A case in point is the bank bailout, putting money from the U.S. Treasury into the pockets of the very individuals who contributed to crashing the world economy by means of unethical lending and investing practices. Banks do not charge fees of people or businesses that maintain large accounts, but they nickel and dime the people who have the smallest accounts and, therefore, the most to lose. The U.S. government, in essence, paid the banking industry for perpetrating fraudulent and illegal business practices, some as unfair fees, to the tune of billions of dollars annually, paid by serfs like you and like me. The dubious business practices continue.

In Das Kapital, Marx observed that the “dissolution” of serfdom in England actually meant that the serfs were cut lose from their feudal relationship so that they could “be free” to sell their farms and work anywhere as a wage slave “divorcing the producer from the means of production”.

From Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chapter 26:

The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man.

Now, remember: this is not something Marx created; this is what he observed about capitalism. This actually (and frighteningly) closely resembles the actions of modern corporations, large and small, that layoff workers and hire, instead private contractors. This improves the bottom line in many ways, the primary of which is that the corporation need not be responsible to the worker by providing health, pension or other benefits. Marx observed that labor dues levied to the feudal lords did not go away; these dues were replaced by state taxes.

Serfs may have been “freed”, but they were taxed and charged fees, sometimes to the point of losing their property. Then, as in Marx’s case study, and now, more and more legislation controls more and more average people, big money interests less and less, to the extent of allowing monopolies to occur, even though they are theoretically illegal.

Fees, in the benign form of local parcel taxes and building permits, are added to the average person’s burden. Yes, we have to vote for a lot of these these, but sometimes our local officials just decide to add things without asking. A friend of mine told me that if you have to pay for a permit to replace a dishwasher in her town. In my town, the city has decided to underground all power wires, charging each property owner $5,000.00 to do so, whether this undergrounding is desired or not. No one voted to be protected from dishwashers or to unsightly wires.

Could this ultimately describe a sort of modern expropriation, where we are charged fees until there ain’t no more in the old bank account? Could all of us “freelancers” and “consultants” be mere serfs, having to provide our own supplies and maintain our own equipment and pay for our own health insurance in order to work for large companies that have no respect or loyalty for workers?

This is unthinkable.

But, once again, I ask you to think on it. This question should be pondered, long and hard, by all workers, everywhere.

Am I a serf?

I’ll tell you what: looking at the disparity, sometimes I think I would rather be a Smurf.

**

Marx, Karl. Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Chapt. 26. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm

  

Endless Now

Mindful footfalls on the shore
sift the sands of time and trial,
shifting thoughts from forward back,
then forward again
to beyond the scope,
where time may bend
and slow, to revel as
endless now.

Counting breaths,
like grains of sand,
like counting glittering music
as it dances away in the wind,
a less than linear movement
that finds completion
glorying in new pathways
to trace endless now.

Thoughts flitter, flutter and flow,
flowering as freely as the wind;
even as thought is tied to form
within all repetitive motions
that construct the sentient world
and feed the conscious flesh,
this free flight is full autonomy
in endless now.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Increasing Facelessness in the Facebook Generation

More and more of our customer service needs are being addressed by circuitous automated phone message jungles or internet queries that can either be in the form of live texting or email exchange. We hear that soon there will be no actual people collecting tolls on toll bridges. There are fewer and fewer local offices where one can pay local utility bills. Many cities and towns no longer have a local department for the handing of fees for fines or citations; these are being funneled to distant addresses.

What does this mean?

In “the age of connectedness and connectivity” we are losing contact with actual people. This does indicate that machines are doing more of our work for us. This also indicates that there are less jobs available to be filled by the living and breathing. But, more importantly, there is less human interaction now, and what we have of that becomes more and more fractured and lacking in the personal and personalities that make life interesting. 


Finding simple information becomes a frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare, in which one must repeat the same question over and over again to different people who answer the phone, or in which one loops through the automated message system, only to get dumped out at the other end, without ever finding the option that meets the need. Clearly, the world of the Frequently Asked & Answered Questions is a limited world of shallow concerns, the very least that providers are willing to be responsible for; any concerns beyond the FAQ, no matter how real, clearly is beyond the average human ability to solve, and therefore must remain unaddressed—for to address the concern not covered by FAQ means taking responsibility for having knowledge pertaining to unique situations. In a self-help, self-service world, nothing is unique, many real flaws and problems are not acknowledged, and we are expected to live our own lives and solve our own problems, whether help is available or not, whether we can pay for it or not.

The scripts for orderly human communication have been thrown away and they are not being replaced. The internet revolution is training us all to scream into the vastness of the universe, without expected to be answered or even heard. Eventually, no one will ask questions, because they will know it to be a colossal waste of time. Or, question asking will become the newest reality TV, where we all be voyeurs while some human becomes inhuman because s/he has been shut away from real human interaction. If such a thing ever comes to pass, will we laugh? Will we cry? What will we do?

The fabric of society has been unraveling for some little time, now, and the yarn is now bunched up in a gigantic, un-biodegradable heap. Institutions and departments and offices and businesses talk past each other, if they talk at all, developing irrational territorial practices that do not fit together, and passing blame when things, systems and people do not work or work well. We call these instances “cognitive dissonance” and we call them “dysfunctional” and we call them “disorganization”, but whatever we call it, and however much we roll our eyes and complain, here we are: it is upon us and we have to live with them all and their inevitable, frequently insoluable, consequences.

Recently, while dining at a restaurant with my family, I witnessed another family and child dining in an atmosphere devoid of interaction. [I have seen it before, and I know I’ll be seeing more of it.] After ordering the meal, each parent completely ignored the child, being entirely engrossed in something displayed on individual smart phones. When the food came, I felt sure that the gizmos would be put away, but I was wrong. The parents silently shoveled the food into their mouths while staring at, and interacting with, the screens of their phones. The child was left to play with her food, humming to herself.

I wondered to myself how children are supposed to learn conversation and etiquette, or indeed any methods of social give-and-take, when their parents, if they possess the knowledge of these things, do not pass the legacy on.

Our “smart phones”, I propose, are making us all “dumb people.” We “connect” only on the basis of the most shallow aspects of vox populi. We answer the rings of our phones while dining out, even though the technology is designed to collect messages for us. We react and overreact to text messaging, because it doesn’t carry the nuance of voice or enough depth to provide context or meaning.

We have technology, but we do not have to understand it. We believe that owning and using it gives us status and power. In reality, technology has made us slaves to aspects of human existence that do not promote beauty, culture, meaning or understanding, but that offer instead frustration, ubiquity and anonymity.

Orwell’s “Big Brother” was a single face of totalitarianism; our modern computer technology is a bit more frightening, in that it offers us whatever face we want to see, so long as we don’t expect it to speak to us, teach us, inspire us or help us to cope with an increasingly dysfunctional existence. Our gizmos draw us into complete and utter self-absorption and they suck our brains into an oblivion every bit as devastating as drug addiction.

If we become aware that we need an intervention, to be freed from the addiction, there is no one to call for help, there are no responsible parties, there is no liability, and we laugh it off, saying “no harm, no foul”.  But it is foul, and we are being harmed in ways we cannot begin to understand.

This, as I see it,  is the great existential crisis of the current generation.