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It's a series of tubes.
I wish to express my gratitude for the intertubes. I was never big on partisanship and polemics. While holding mainly leftist views, with some starkly rightist ones thrown in for flavor, I had long held that progressives were mostly hypocrites who called the police on people in trouble before they would simply help them, where conservatives did mostly the exact opposite, that maybe liberals wanted everyone cared for, but they wanted it to get them out of their faces. I wasn't born yesterday. I have lived in hipneck world for a long time. I have vast personal experience to inform me on this.
The advent of Dubya, and the obviously rigged election, yanked me right down into the trees from my lovely forest view. It made me want to be online, where I had really no use for it before. I wanted to read books and write them. I wanted my privacy and serenity, and I wanted my friends to be there for me and to be there for my friends. I wanted my neighbors, the black bears and the mountain lions and the ravens and the frogs. Everything else, I didn't want. I was plenty enough engaged with the world from my remove, and had long since given up the TV completely. So by the time 9/11 rolled around and all the warring started up and ANOTHER election was stolen for Dubya, I was desperate to get on the internet to find lucid people, people who weren't just shrugging and going on about their lives.
I guess I'm trying to say that all that slaughtering of citizens by the Clinton feds that never sat well with me; the cognitive dissonance surrounding the OKC bombing, the OJ trial, the plane shot down out of New York, JFK Jr., Princess Di, all kinds of outrageous things that weren't being handled anything like correctly; the increasingly urgent exclamations from Old Uncle Dave about 9/11; the in-your-face corrupt presidential elections; the United States actually INVADING other countries—all of it—made me want to connect with people everywhere, made me not want to wait for the book, or even for the magazine article, or even the newspaper article. It had been a veritable mountain of offenses to anything remotely resembling decency that finally landed me splat on the forest floor from my Zen remove, my recondite view, and entangled me in the series of tubes.
Several friends had been telling me I would make a great blogger. I don't know how many times someone had to explain the concept to me. I would use someone's internet connection to look up "blog" every so often to see if that would put me wise to it, but the most I ever got were pages of people doing things like reporting the fact that they'd been to the bar and had not gotten laid... over and over and over again. Pfeh. Oh, hell yes. I could indeed do better than that. BFD. Nobody seemed to have the first part of a clue how one went about making a blog. So I just considered myself blessed to have both a new computer and an internet connection when HuffPo was born. It was great in its first months of life. And that's how I found Brad, whose posts about the stolen 2004 election felt like ambrosia being poured on me. I was BESIDE myself over that, and NOBODY would go there. So we could say that relief valve served to keep me blind to too much too long.
The first five years of my life online amounted to one hell of a fantastic Zen lesson from the buddhas of the ten directions. On top of all the horrors of the world, my relationship blew up, I had to have MAJOR surgery to avoid paraplegia, and numerous health sequela all conspired to deck me. I could feel my beautiful view punching around in a dense fog somewhere in my inner cosmos, but I could not see it or hear it or connect with it. All I could do was know it was in there and everything, everything, everything was wrong if I could not get back to it, could not blow the stinking and opaque miasma from it and SEE and HEAR and SMELL and TOUCH and TASTE from there again. It's almost as though everything awful in the wide world has happened in order to scour the delusion from me, to turn me into a mistress of complete perfect enlightenment or kill me.
Your shit has made me wish hotly for the dead part of that bargain a few times, but I can't take that way out. I was given a gift more perfect than anyone ever gets and NOTHING could ever make me so ungrateful as to opt out of whatever amount of effort is involved in living up to it. It strikes me that you need to contemplate this: Everything that happens is happening to teach you to wake up. That's why so many people are DETERMINED God exists in any one of the goofy ways prefab for one to think of deity. They can sense the personal lessons in what appears to simply be random incidents. They immediately err to then believe they're not random, that they are pointed at them by God. They ARE random. Your relation with them comes about because what's INSIDE you wants your attention, wants to get past your benighted ego and get you to a REAL life, to TRUE humanity. People mistake their own enlightening being for God. They're lucky enough to see the subtle hint, but conditioned so unbreakably as to go off down the garden path to deal with it instead of get on their very OWN path and live up to themselves.
It is NOT just religion. You can see it at work in all these FUCKING PATHETIC EXCUSES FOR ACTIVISTS everywhere you click in our tangle of tubes. From the halls of the execrable Richard Dawkins to the even more execrable Kevin Zeese and all points right and left of these braying jackasses, you find people trolling for eyeprints and DONATIONS to keep their inactivism alive. Because they call it activism should not fool anyone for a moment, but it fools everyone. It's worse even than what we call democracy. More people grok that democracy isn't any such a thing nowadays than those who realize merely gathering a readership and/or donations is NOT activism. If anyone goes further than merely calling their inactivism "activism" and actually acts, immediately the inducements to revert back start in, and they work beautifully 99.99999% of the time... because the claim to virtue and/or the living eked from it completely obliterate any notions of actually PERFORMING anything approximating activism.
It's all so engaging and absorbing and fast-paced and busy. I cannot for the life of me see why ANYONE is yet mystified by Dōgen's injunction to stop doing and perform, why the stage of not doing is still a stumbling block for the multitudes practicing the seriously wrong aspect of that term. There's a big difference between Dōgen's not doing and the lethal inactivism parading around as performance.
There is ONE way out of this hell. One. Take it. Quit yer filthy bickering. Learn your lessons. Wake up.
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