The Difference Between When a White Man Versus a Black Man Carries a Gun

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The nature of privilege is that privileged people aren’t taught about their privilege but are taught to not empathize or acknowledge the realities of marginalized peoples. And when it comes to racism, our society wants to desperately say that we’re a colorblind nation and racism is something that ended with slavery – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To help you grapple with how different the experiences of white people and Black people can be in the US, check out the video above by The Daily Show on what happens when a white man and a Black man assert their right to bear arms.

OneLove

:::MME::: 

Musings

The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy

From luxury skyscrapers -- taller, more expensive and exclusive than ever before -- the dark shadows of plutocracy are spreading across the commons of democracy. (Source).

Be the resistance..

OneLove

:::MME:::

The Black Power Mixtape

In the late '60s, after the assassination of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement in America gave way to a more militant breed of activists who were demanding greater self-determination for the African-American community and the right to defend themselves against a system they felt was stacked against them. A number of journalists for Swedish television were fascinated with the rise of the Black Panther Party and the larger Black Power movement, and on several occasions sent film crews to the United State to interview major figures in the African-American militant community. Filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson has used some of this archival footage as the basis for the documentary The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975, which includes vintage interviews with Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Louis Farrakhan, and other key figures in the Black Power movement. The newsreels are accompanied by recent interviews with artists, activists, and cultural historians who discuss this volatile period in American history, including Harry Belafonte, Abiodun Oyewole, Melvin Van Peebles, and many others. The Black Power Mixtape was an official selection at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. 
 (Source)

Absorb & connect..

OneLove

:::MME:::

Warmongers Victorious

With the GOP soon to control both houses of Congress and the firing of Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon, it appears Washington’s neocons will face little opposition when demanding more foreign interventions. The hawks again will have their day – who will be their victims? Will Pres. Obama reclaim his nuts & fight against this militarism or, more precisely, can he reclaim his nuts?

We gotta raise the heat on these pricks who are destroying our democracy right before our very eyes....

OneLove

:::MME:::

Police as Occupying Army

The streets of Ferguson remain alert and tense. Activist leaders from across the U.S. have come to stand in solidarity with the people of this sad and angry community. A majority black community, Ferguson had an unemployment rate of 5 per cent in 2000, which has now risen to 13 per cent. Poverty stalks places like Ferguson —its poverty rate doubled over the past decade. One in four people in this town of 21,000 lives in poverty. The response to the poverty has not been social services or jobs programmes. It has been a muscular police force that does not feel like it is a part of the community. It is a true reflection of reality for the police to behave like an occupying army. That is precisely its relationship to the growth of poverty and hopelessness in places like Ferguson. 
-Vijay Prashad from Frontline

OneLove

:::MME:::

Ferguson Isn't about Black Rage Against Cops. It's White Rage Against Progress by Carol Anderson

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.

White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash.

The North’s victory in the Civil War did not bring peace. Instead, emancipation brought white resentment that the good ol’ days of black subjugation were over. Legislatures throughout the South scrambled to reinscribe white supremacy and restore the aura of legitimacy that the anti-slavery campaign had tarnished. Lawmakers in several states created the Black Codes, which effectively criminalized blackness, sanctioned forced labor and undermined every tenet of democracy. Even the federal authorities’ promise of 40 acres — land seized from traitors who had tried to destroy the United States of America — crumbled like dust.

Influential white legislators such as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.) and Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) tried to make this nation live its creed, but they were no match for the swelling resentment that neutralized the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, and welcomed the Supreme Court’s 1876 United States vs. Cruikshank decision, which undercut a law aimed at stopping the terror of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nearly 80 years later, Brown v. Board of Education seemed like another moment of triumph — with the ruling on the unconstitutionality of separate public schools for black and white students affirming African Americans’ rights as citizens. But black children, hungry for quality education, ran headlong into more white rage. Bricks and mobs at school doors were only the most obvious signs. In March 1956, 101 members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, declaring war on the Brown decision. Governors in Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and elsewhere then launched “massive resistance.” They created a legal doctrine, interposition, that supposedly nullified any federal law or court decision with which a state disagreed. They passed legislation to withhold public funding from any school that abided by Brown. They shut down public school systems and used tax dollars to ensure that whites could continue their education at racially exclusive private academies. Black children were left to rot with no viable option.

A little more than half a century after Brown, the election of Obama gave hope to the country and the world that a new racial climate had emerged in America, or that it would. But such audacious hopes would be short-lived. A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger.

It’s more subtle — less overtly racist — than in 1865 or even 1954. It’s a remake of the Southern Strategy, crafted in the wake of the civil rights movement to exploit white resentment against African Americans, and deployed with precision by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As Reagan’s key political strategist, Lee Atwater, explained in a 1981 interview: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N-----, n-----, n-----.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n-----’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’ and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that.” (The interview was originally published anonymously, and only years later did it emerge that Atwater was the subject.)

Now, under the guise of protecting the sanctity of the ballot box, conservatives have devised measures — such as photo ID requirements — to block African Americans’ access to the polls. A joint report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the NAACP emphasized that the ID requirements would adversely affect more than 6 million African American voters. (Twenty-five percent of black Americans lack a government-issued photo ID, the report noted, compared with only 8 percent of white Americans.) The Supreme Court sanctioned this discrimination in Shelby County v. Holder , which gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to 21st-century versions of 19th-century literacy tests and poll taxes.

The economic devastation of the Great Recession also shows African Americans under siege. The foreclosure crisis hit black Americans harder than any other group in the United States. A 2013 report by researchers at Brandeis University calculated that “half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession,” in large part because of the impact on home equity. In the process, the wealth gap between blacks and whites grew: Right before the recession, white Americans had four times more wealth than black Americans, on average; by 2010, the gap had increased to six times. This was a targeted hit. Communities of color were far more likely to have riskier, higher-interest-rate loans than white communities, with good credit scores often making no difference.

Add to this the tea party movement’s assault on so-called Big Government, which despite the sanitized language of fiscal responsibility constitutes an attack on African American jobs. Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14 years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.

Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage. 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

We have to dismantle the house of horrors that this country has become.... let your voice be heard!

OneLove

:::MME:::

Never Tell People How Old They Look

The older I get, the better I feel, truth be told. In a youth-oriented culture, this may seem quite strange as youthfulness is heavily marketed & fetishized. As long as you keep yourself in good mental and physical health, getting older is a beautiful experience.Let's hope that one day modern societies can rediscover the beauty & honor of being old/older.   

OneLove

 ::MME:::

Most White People in America Are Completely Oblivious by Tim Wise

I suppose there is no longer much point in debating the facts surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. First, because Officer Darren Wilson has been cleared by a grand jury, and even the collective brilliance of a thousand bloggers pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in his version of events that August day won’t result in a different outcome. And second, because Wilson’s guilt or innocence was always somewhat secondary to the larger issue: namely, the issue of this gigantic national inkblot staring us in the face, and what we see when we look at it—and more to the point, why?

Because it is a kind of racial Rorschach (is it not?) into which each of these cases—not just Brown but all the others, from Trayvon Martin to Sean Bell to Patrick Dorismond to Aswan Watson and beyond—inevitably and without fail morph. That we see such different things when we look upon them must mean something. That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially-constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.

Not to overdo the medical metaphors, but as with those other cases noted above, so too in this one did a disturbing number of whites manifest something of a repetitive motion disorder—a reflex nearly as automatic as the one that leads so many police (or wanna-be police) to fire their weapons at black men in the first place. It is a reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, trash the dead with blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one’s own response to it had anything to do with race.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending around those phony pictures claimed to be of Mike Brown posing with a gun, or the one passed off as Darren Wilson in a hospital bed with his orbital socket blown out.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how quickly those pictures were believed to be genuine by so many who distributed them on social media, even when they weren’t, and how difficult it is for some to discern the difference between one black man and another.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how rapidly many bought the story that Wilson had been attacked and bloodied, even as video showed him calmly standing at the scene of the shooting without injury, and even as the preliminary report on the incident made no mention of any injuries to Officer Wilson, and even as Wilson apparently has a history of power-tripping belligerence towards those with whom he interacts, and a propensity to distort the details of those encounters as well.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about Cardinals fans taunting peaceful protesters who gathered outside a playoff game to raise the issue of Brown’s death, by calling them crackheads or telling them that it was only because of whites that blacks have any freedoms at all, or that they should “get jobs” or “pull up their pants,” or go back to Africa.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending money to Darren Wilson’s defense fund and then explaining one’s donation by saying what a service the officer had performed by removing a “savage” like Brown from the community, or by referring to Wilson’s actions as “animal control.”

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about reaction to evidence of weed in Brown’s lifeless body, as with Trayvon’s before him, even though whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks, but rarely have that fact offered up as a reason for why we might deserve to be shot by police.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial behind the belief that the head of the Missouri Highway Patrol, brought in to calm tensions in Ferguson, was throwing up gang signs on camera, when actually, it was a hand sign for the black fraternity of which that officer is a member; and to deny that there is anything racial about one’s stunning ignorance as to the difference between those two things.

Reflex: To deny that there’s anything at all racial about the way that even black victims of violence—like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens of others—are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for several weeks.

And most of all, the reflex to deny that there is anything racial about the lens through which we typically view law enforcement; to deny that being white has shaped our understanding of policing and their actions in places like Ferguson, even as being white has had everything to do with those matters. Racial identity shapes the way we are treated by cops, and as such, shapes the way we are likely to view them. As a general rule, nothing we do will get us shot by law enforcement: not walking around in a big box store with semi-automatic weapons (though standing in one with an air rifle gets you killed if you’re black); not assaulting two officers, even in the St. Louis area, a mere five days after Mike Brown was killed; not pointing a loaded weapon at three officers and demanding that they—the police—”drop their fucking guns;” not committing mass murder in a movie theatre before finally being taken alive; not proceeding in the wake of that event to walk around the same town in which it happened carrying a shotgun; and not killing a cop so as to spark a “revolution,” and then leading others on a two month chase through the woods before being arrested with only a few scratches.

To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the twentieth century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.

We can remain ignorant to the ubiquity of police misconduct, thinking it the paranoid fever dream of irrational “race-card” playing peoples of color, just like we did after the O.J. Simpson verdict. When most of black America responded to that verdict with cathartic relief—not because they necessarily thought Simpson innocent but because they felt there were enough questions raised about police in the case to sow reasonable doubt—most white folks concluded that black America had lost its collective mind. How could they possibly believe that the LAPD would plant evidence in an attempt to frame or sweeten the case against a criminal defendant? A few years later, had we been paying attention (but of course, we were not), we would have had our answer. It was then that the scandal in the city’s Ramparts division broke, implicating dozens of police in over a hundred cases of misconduct, including, in one incident, shooting a gang member at point blank range and then planting a weapon on him to make the incident appear as self-defense. So putting aside the guilt or innocence of O.J,, clearly it was not irrational for black Angelenos (and Americans) to give one the likes of Mark Fuhrman side-eye after his own racism was revealed in that case.

I think this, more than anything, is the source of our trouble when it comes to racial division in this country. The inability of white people to hear black reality—to not even know that there is one and that it differs from our own—makes it nearly impossible to move forward. But how can we expect black folks to trust law enforcement or to view it in the same heroic and selfless terms that so many of us apparently do? The law has been a weapon used against black bodies, not a shield intended to defend them, and for a very long time.

In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.

But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.

These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.

Can we perhaps, just this once, admit our collective blind spot? Admit that there are things going on, and that have been going on a very long time, about which we know nothing? Might we suspend our disbelief, just long enough to gain some much needed insights about the society we share? One wonders what it will take for us to not merely listen but actually to hear the voices of black parents, fearful that the next time their child walks out the door may be the last, and all because someone—an officer or a self-appointed vigilante—sees them as dangerous, as disrespectful, as reaching for their gun? Might we be able to hear that without deftly pivoting to the much more comfortable (for us) topic of black crime or single-parent homes? Without deflecting the real and understandable fear of police abuse with lectures about the danger of having a victim mentality—especially ironic given that such lectures come from a people who apparently see ourselves as the always imminent victims of big black men?

Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day and in a million ways before lunch how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. Because that’s what we’re telling black folks on the daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera—no doubt speaking for many more in the process—we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, even though in almost all cases they are found to have done nothing wrong, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, and where they will be treated like inmates more than children hoping to learn, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells black men—but only black men—to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.

And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.

But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body.
                                                                **********

OneLove

:::MME:::

Obedience is the True Character Flaw by Paul Street

 

If you publicly dissent from and act against prevailing United States orthodoxies and the reigning US power structure, chances are good you will face personal and/or professional defamation and the charge of psychological unreliability and instability. It will be said that there’s something wrong and untrustworthy about you.  You will be demonized, dismissed, and demeaned as a marginal, inappropriate, and hyper-alienated oddball, a maladjusted eccentric no one should take seriously.

Kill the Messenger

Just as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsburg.  He committed a great public service by releasing the Pentagon Papers, thousands of pages of Pentagon documents showing that the murderous US policies and practices in Vietnam had nothing to do with Washington’s officially stated noble goals behind the “Vietnam War.” US President Richard Nixon responded by having the FBI break into the office of Ellsburg’s psychiatrist to release embarrassing information about Ellsburg’s personal life. The media took the bait, throwing a shadow of suspicion on the whistleblower’s sanity even as it published the documents he released.

Gary Webb

Consider also the smaller and more depressing story of Gary Webb, recently told in the movie Kill The Messenger. Webb was the San Jose Mercury News journalist who discovered and in 1996 reported CIA involvement in the selling of crack cocaine in Los Angeles to help finance the US-backed right-wing terrorists knows as the Contras in their bloody war on the popular-revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980s. After initially reporting Webb’s findings, the nation’s leading media organizations (including the Washington Post and the New York Times) attacked Webb professionally. They questioned his journalistic integrity. The assault led to Webb’s shunning, demotion, resignation, and, in 2004, his suicide.

In 1998, an internal CIA report found that Webb’s carefully gathered findings were accurate. The Justice Department also conducted an internal investigation that vindicated Webb’s findings, long after anyone seemed to care. As Michael Parenti noted, “Webb’s real mistake was not that he wrote falsehoods, but that he ventured too far into the truth.” [1]

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning

Then there’s the case of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.  Four years ago, the New York Times published what it designated as “The Iraq War Logs,” a massive collection of Pentagon documents detailing war crimes and other abuses committed by the US and its proxies during the arch-criminal US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Obtained from the whistleblowing US Army Private Chelsea Manning, the documents were made available to the Times and other media outlets by Assange and WikiLeaks. It was not the first time that the Times and other leading papers had collaborated with Assange and gained from Manning’s disclosures.

At the very same time, however, the Times published with equal prominence a front-page report attacking Assange’s character and personality.  Penned by leading Times correspondent John Burns, this article portrayed Assange as grandiose, delusional, paranoid, and irrationally hateful of the US. [2]

The Times and other media outlets following its lead soon depicted Manning in an equally unfavorable light, attributing her whistleblowing to personality disorders, not to any genuine concern with state crimes. Reporters did not seem remotely impressed by the remarkable courage of Manning, who faced life in prison and torture and humiliation at the hands of her US military captors.

Edward Snowden and Glen Greenwald

The pattern was repeated in the early summer of 2013, when the greatest US whistleblower to date, Edward Snowden, a former private security contractor, came out with his remarkable, massively documented revelations about the US National Security Agency’s far-reaching programs (“beyond Orwellian” according to the ACLU) for total global Internet surveillance and disruption – programs undertaken with the cooperation of the nation’s leading Internet, software, and telecommunications corporations. The US corporate mass media initially ate up the Snowden revelations in a competitive news feeding frenzy.  The Snowden leak, transmitted though the reporting of leading civil-libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, became the nation’s top media story for considerably longer than the usual news cycle.

Soon, however, the personal assassinations and discrediting began, as mass media operatives returned to their normative pattern: reflexive service to state power. From the Times on down (the usual pattern), Snowden was accused of “fame-seeking narcissism,” cynical arrogance, nihilistic individualism, treason, criminal deviance, and cowardice.  He was called a “loner” and a “loser.” Times columnist David Brooks (an obsequious boot-licker of the power elite) said that Snowden represented “the rise of people so individualistic…that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.”

Greenwald was attacked as an “unreasonable” and anti-American “activist” and “blogger” who was not a real “journalist” – this despite his many years of reporting and commentary at a leading British newspaper (The Guardian). Beyond serious charges of criminality, the assaults on Greenwald became laughably petty and personal, including “revelations” about past tax debt, alleged investment in a pornographic film company, and purported bad behavior as a tenant in an apartment building. [3]

Three Imperatives 

Why these attacks on whistleblowers’ and journalists’ professional and personal integrity and character?  It comes down to three basic power imperatives.  The first priority is to undermine the effectiveness of those who challenge the received doctrine on the supposed benevolence of US policy by depicting them as people with whom no regular and sane folks would want to be associated.
The second obligation is to deter others from challenging authority by demonstrating that one becomes a dissident only at the strong risk of being socially shamed and shunned: “you don’t want to go there; look what happened to that dissident.”

The third imperative is a matter of logical and doctrinal necessity. “For guardians of the status quo,” Greenwald notes in his recent book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State, “there is nothing genuinely or fundamentally wrong with the prevailing order and its dominant institutions, which are viewed as just.  Therefore, anyone claiming otherwise – especially someone sufficiently motivated by that belief to take radical action – must, by definition, be emotionally unstable and psychologically disabled… Radical dissent is evidence, even proof, of a severe personality disorder.” [4]

Submission as a Moral Choice

The problem is that, by any reasonable standard, “the prevailing order and its dominant institutions” are anything but just. Quite to the contrary, the United States’ ever more openly plutocratic and wantonly murderous so-called capitalist democracy seems dedicated not merely to the endless upward and antidemocratic upward concentration of wealth and power but also to an endless, self-fulfilling global war of/on terror, the marginalization of the “homeland” citizenry (particularly through infantilizing and atomizing corporate-owned media and electoral spectacles), the expansion of corporate and state surveillance to the point where the right to privacy becomes a distant memory, and the ruination of livable ecology (and thus of prospects for a decent future) through the relentless extraction and burning of fossil fuels. [5] Justice and democracy are the last things one can reasonably expect from the reigning US order, which Peter McLaren rightly calls “the most powerful conglomeration of cultural, political, and economic oppression ever assembled in history.” [6]

Given the severe threats posed by US empire, inequality, and “capitalist  at home and abroad, one could ask what kind of pathology lays behind the decision of most US citizens NOT to openly challenge and resist the status quo. Might there be something psychologically wrong with this mass obedience?  The question is beyond consideration for champions of the established order – that is, for the preponderant majority of the nation’s heavily indoctrinated and mind-disciplined media personnel and other “intellectuals.” [7] As Greenwald explains, the reigning conventional wisdom on the maladjustment of dissenters rests on “an essential deceit: that dissent from institutional authority involves a moral or ideological choice, while obedience does not.  

With that false premise in place, society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions.” In reality, however, “both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices and both courses of action reveal something important about the individual involved.  Contrary to accepted premise – that radical dissent demonstrates a personality disorder – the opposite could be true: in the face of severe injustice a refusal to dissent is the sign of a character flaw or moral failure.” [8]

A Social Disease: The Logic of Individual Obedience

Obedience may arise from any number of motivations.  The possible driving forces include an irrational trust in authority, insufficient confidence in one’s own opinion or in one’s ability to develop an informed opinion, or a fear of repercussions likely to follow from questioning and challenging authority.  The last motive (fear) likely makes no small sense for many given the nasty treatment dissenters quite visibly receive from government and media powers. Jobs, homes, health/health coverage, family relationships and more are all stake once one is marked as a dissident.  The silencing power of this fear is heightened significantly by the pervasiveness of surveillance.

Lack of confidence in one’s opinion or understanding on and of current events also makes a significant amount of sense in a political environment shaped by power-serving and power-reflecting corporate mass media.  That media is institutionally mandated to given a strictly stunted presentation and interpretation of current events in accord with the narrow confines of corporate and imperial neoliberal ideology.  It’s not merely that US “mainstream” media is beholden to corporate America for advertising dollars or to the imperial state for access to information.  That media is itself a deeply entrenched institutional component of the corporate structure and indeed of the imperial state.  Asking it to substantively engage the leading issues of our time from anything but a highly constricted, power-serving perspective is like asking the editors’ of General Motors’ company newspaper to publish hard-hitting exposes on the exploitation of labor in GM’s assembly plants or on GM environmental crimes.

Thanks to these and other harsh realities of class rule and institutional authority, the deadly pathology that is mass obedience to unjust power is a societal sickness imposed from the top down by those atop elite-controlled institutions – including above all the handful of corporate media conglomerates that together own “most of the nation’s newspapers, magazines, book publishing houses, movie studios, cable channels, record labels, broadcast networks and channels, and radio and television programming in the US.”[9]

“Humanity Will Reemerge”

Given all this and much more that could be said about why “free” US citizens submit to maddeningly unjust and deadly power, the remarkable thing is that large numbers of Americans do still recurrently form and join great demonstrations and movements of popular protest and resistance.  Citing Snowden as an example of “the extraordinary ability of any human being to change the world,” Greenwald reminds us that “it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret, who can decide what kind of world we live in.”[10] From confronting the nation and globe’s currently savage levels of economic disparity and (intimately related) plutocracy to resisting racist police violence (i.e., the remarkable Ferguson protest campaign) to challenging the deadly plagues of global militarism and climate change, masses of “ordinary” people can and will assemble and mobilize in extraordinary ways to create a just, peaceful, democratic, and sustainable world.  “Today….whe[n] we have seen our humanity swept away like a child’s sigh in a tornado,” McLaren writes, “we – as humans – will  reemerge.  We will reappear…in the smoldering haze of tear gas and demands for democracy…seek[ing] a world founded on dignity, economic equality, creativity, peace, cooperation, love, and justice for our fellow human beings and for the planet that sustains us.”[11] Along the way, we can and must reverse the prevalent establishment psychological messaging on radical dissent and mass obedience, enshrining the former as the healthy norm – the real sign of individual and social character.

Paul Street's website: http://www.paulstreet.org/


1. Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), 20.
2. John Burns, “WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety,” New York Times, October 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html?hp&_r=0
3. Greg Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan, 2014), 210-225.
4. Greenwald, No Place to Hide, 227.
5.  For my take on these and related problems, see Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014).
6.  Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy and the Founda tions of Education (Paradigm, 2015), xxi.
7. Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
8. Greenwald, No Place to Hide, 227-28.
9.  Parenti, Contrary Notions, 11.
10. Greenwald, No Place to Hide, 253.
11. McLaren, Life in Schools, xxi.

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OneLove

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Musings

OneLove 

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Observations on President Putin’s Call Upon US Not to Meddle in Russia Affairs by Peter Koenig

     

Press TV   reports on 22 November 2014 that President Putin, speaking at a forum of the All-Russia Peoples' Front in Moscow on 17 November, said “They [the US] want to subdue us, want to solve their problems at our expense. No one in history ever managed to do this to Russia, and no one ever will.”

This is certainly no exaggeration. Russia has not only a solid trade and monetary alliance with China which already today bypasses the western dollar dominated western system, Russia is also one of the key members of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which met last September in Dushanbe, Tajikistan to expands its current membership (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) by including India, Pakistan, Iran and likely also Mongolia. Turkey, hosting a strategically crucial NATO base, wavering between east and west, has wanted to become an SCO member for quite a while. Turkish-speaking SCO governments would likely to support their petition. This would clearly be a huge conflict and blow to the western powers, particularly Washington – and may not go ‘unpunished’.

The expanded SCO would control some 20 percent of the world’s oil and half of all global gas reserves. On top of that, the bloc would represent about half of the world’s population. The SCO and BRICS together would cover more than half the world’s population and control about a third of the globe’s GDP.

The issuance of a joint new global currency either by these countries at once or step by step is almost a certainty. The question is when. Given the disastrous course of western economies, such a new currency and monetary system is not far off. It would gradually replace the (petro) dollar for world trading as well as a reserve currency. The latter has already started. Ten years ago about 90% of world reserves consisted of dollar denominated securities. Today this proportion has shrunk to 60% - and – to the ignorance of most of the world – is steadily declining.

According to the IMF, reserves in other currencies in emerging markets have shot up by 400% since 2003. From August 2013 to February 2014, South Korea increased its yuan holdings 25-fold.

So – Mr. Putin’s seemingly ‘bold’ statement is very much supported by facts. The western predatory economic system is decaying fast. Russia and China are already today prepared with an alternative. They are working actively with the other BRICS and SCO countries to prepare a solid larger scale alternative currency and monetary system, free from the FED, Wall Street, the IMF and the BIS (Bank for International Settlements). 
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Dr. Peter Koenig has more than 25 years of experience in international trade regulation across a wide range of issues from trade remedy (antidumping, countervailing duty) proceedings, to US Customs, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, World Trade Organization and trade policy. A listing of experience as to specific fields is available on request. Peter also served on an Administrative Conference Advisory Group to the US Congress with regard to US trade laws and on the Customs Committee of the American Bar Association. He was formerly with the Office of Policy, Federal Trade Commission, then International Trade Counsel at U.S. Steel and finally with the law firm Miller & Chevalier. An authority on US trade laws, he has been called as an expert witness to testify in high-profile cases. He has published articles in leading law journals such as the Stanford Journal of International Law. For years Peter also has been an adjunct professor in economics, finance, accounting and law at various major universities across the United States with all disciplines related to trade regulation. He has a Ph.D. in Economics, specializing in Industrial Organization. He is known for his work in areas where law and economics interface.                                                                            ********** OneLove :::MME:::

Neoliberal Violence in the Age of Orwellian Nightmares by Henry A.Giroux

The shadow of Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society with its all-embracing reach of surveillance and repression now works its way through American politics like a lethal virus. Orwell’s dystopian apparition of a totalitarian society with its all-embracing reach of surveillance and repression has come to fruition, reshaping the American body politic in the guise of a poorly orchestrated Reality TV show. As Orwell rightly predicted, one of the more significant characteristics of an authoritarian society is its willingness to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. But Orwell was only partly right. Today, rather than just agressively instill a sense of fear, dread and isolation, contemporary totalitarian commitment also wins over large number of individuals through appeals to our most debased instincts projected on to hapless others. Our lurid fascination with others’ humiliation and paen is often disguised even to ourselves as entertainment and humor, if perhaps admittedly a little perverse. Under the new authoritarianism fear mixes with the endless production of neoliberal commonsense and a deadening coma-inducing form of celebrity culture. Huxley’s Soma now joins hands with Orwell’s surveillance state.

Jeremy Scahill on Obama's Orwellian War in Iraq

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” ― -Abraham Lincoln 

OneLove

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How Our Media Are Helping Turn America Into a Land of Political Idiots by Marty Kaplan

Just days after the midterm election, President Barack Obama made a big climate change deal with China, asked the FCC to regulate Internet service providers as if they were public utilities and pledged to address the immigration mess on his own instead of continuing to wait for Congress to arise from its dysfunctional deathbed.

The president’s inaction on these issues until now was intended to prevent the electoral debacle and partisan caterwauling that happened anyway.  His previous patience has proven to be time squandered, and his search for common ground with folks who wanted his head on a pike turned out to be a case study in bad poker playing, if not wishful thinking.

This post-election Obama is the one voters thought they put into office in 2008, but who spent the next six years being called naïve for projecting their civic hopes onto a cypher.  Whatever triggered his transformation – legacy clock ticking, nothing left to lose, stopbullying.gov – it’s a heartening moment for his base. The challenge now for him is to deliver on that change; the challenge for his supporters is to rescue the stakes of these changes from soap opera.

We love political melodrama. “Will the Republicans force a government shutdown by baiting Obama to veto a budget that defunds immigration reform?” is the Washington equivalent of “What will Lance do when Kimberly tells him his lover is actually his sister?”  “Will the House impeach Obama?” is as effective a cliffhanger as “Will the train slice Pauline into pieces?”  The same narrative toolkit that makes stories entertaining – conflict, suspense, danger and rescue, power and perversion – also makes democracy theatrical and casts its citizens as spectators.  

The news media cover politics like a long-running serial in chronic need of crisis.  It doesn’t matter whether they caused this or merely reflect it. Politicians are so accustomed to being performers that wondering whether Ted Cruz actually believes the things he says is as misbegotten a mission as searching for the real Justin Bieber.  It’s not our fault that the political characters angling for our attention seem no more authentic than the Punch and Judy roles they play – their words are scripted, their images are cosmetic and their stories hew to the genre conventions that spawned them.

The downside of storified self-government, and of experiencing pretty much everything else as entertainment, too, is that we relinquish our grip on reality.  In a series of 36 tweets (the perfect vehicle for such an argument), Grist.org columnist David Roberts, writing about the Supreme Court’s decision to hear a potentially fatal challenge to the Affordable Care Act – a case whose only conceivable basis is a typographical error in the law – calls this “postmodern conservatism.” The right’s “nihilistic oppositionalism,” he says, makes its own reality.  They have “realized that if you just brazen it out, there’s no… ref to make the call.  In this way, every dispute, even over matters of fact, becomes a contest of power – loudest, best funded, most persistent voices win…. Epistemology becomes competing tantrums…. So there will only be increasing impetus for cons[ervatives] to retreat into fantasy, into simple morality tales… [which] always yield more motivated, organized constituencies than ‘it’s complicated’ ever will.”

Conservatives, of course, accuse the left of worse than fantasy.  The title of a book by James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican about to chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, depicts it as deceit: The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. But all he’s really doing is reframing the left’s strategy – to inform voters about scientific data – as the plot of an airport thriller. “The bad guys are gunning for you!” is much more entertaining than, “May I please explain this graph to you?” And the studio funding that storyline – the fossil fuel industry – has the largest marketing budget in the world.

It’s in the economic self-interest of the news media to make politics as fun as wrestling and as risky as a high-wire act. That’s what drives ratings. But we pay a steep price for the pleasures of circus and spectacle. The most critical problem American society faces right now is, arguably, inequality, and the plutocracy that benefits from it, and the corruption that puts remedies for it beyond our constitutional reach. Every breathless story about impeachment occupies bandwidth not given to exploring the structural problems that Naomi Klein addresses in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, or the disinformation that Paul Krugman decimates in his columns, or the oligarchy that the Occupy movement was crushed for trying to put on the national agenda.

Have you seen the 2006 movie Idiocracy? It projects contemporary commercialism, anti-intellectualism and the showbizzification of everything into a dystopian America five centuries from now. Five minutes is more like it. “Welcome to Costco, I love you” is what superstore greeters say in the future, but today’s nihilists already claim to be “fair and balanced.”  If you’re more sanguine than I am about the news media’s incentives to be the ref and make the call, to say what’s real and what matters, just imagine what public discourse will be like when the 2016 campaign gets going.  We will never get back those hours we spent watching Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Sure, it was all very diverting.  But distraction is the mother’s milk of the 1 percent.

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OneLove

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Drifting Backwards

When the Ferguson saga unfolded, I overheard my white colleagues at work justifying the shooting of Mike Brown by Darren Wilson. I was not surprised, truth be told, as over the years I have overheard similar conversations amongst white colleagues at other jobs & public spaces. There really are two Americas or, as the late great scholar W.E.B Dubois observed, 

..gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which . . . only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.  

As it waits to hear if a grand jury will indict Darren Wilson for shooting down Michael Brown, Ferguson is more than ever a volatile amalgam of forces drawn up against each other: Governor Jay Nixon announced the use of state power against anyone uppity enough to challenge the decision (he's already pre-emptively declared a state of emergency), law enforcement loudly gears up for the alleged threat of extremists and Communists (?!) joining protests & the KKK  threatens "lethal force" against "terrorists masquerading as 'peaceful protesters,'" Madness. In A Communiqué from Ferguson (above), a powerful new 9-minute video from the community and its myriad activist groups, people describe the explosive feeling on the ground. Above all, they insist that the wrongs represented by Michael Brown's murder - Ferguson's failings and abuses and systemic racism - are "an American problem." They've also launched the hashtag #FergusonSpeaks. It's long past time somebody listen. 

Let's pray...

OneLove

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Death-by-Desk

The modern office desk should be considered a slow-moving death trap.  Just look at the number of fitness magazines that have run stories about the fatal perils of sitting at an office desk for eight hours and you’ll find stories about how it makes you sick,  fat, weak and...dead. 

All that time spent sitting and staring at a computer while your fingers engage in a zombified Riverdance across your keyboard is one of the worst things you can be doing to yourself. A study by the University of Hong Kong even found that people would be better off walking around and smoking than sitting all day and doing nothing. More, a quarter of all deaths of people aged 35 and up were caused by a lack of physical exercise.

Death-by-desk job is becoming such a white collar health epidemic that there are now exercise regimens designed specifically for people who stay velcroed to their office chair all day. Seriously, your hours spent toiling at your desk job isn’t going to result in a fun retirement party; it’s going to result in one chilly dirt nap, and probably sooner than your retirement pension would kick in, too. 

As an incentive to get your ass up and moving, have a look at this infographic about how your desk job is systematically filing years off of your life. When you’re done, do yourself a favor and go walk around for a bit. If nothing else, it’ll keep the blood in your legs from calcifying before the end of your work day.



OneLove

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Four Things The Great Masters All Aimed To Teach Us

    

“The wise have mastered body, word and mind. They are the true masters.” – Buddha

When we look for those who have inspired and influenced people over the millennia, we keep returning to the great leaders who have provided clarity and wisdom on what it means to be human. These great teachers, prophets and sages, have never set out to be religious or spiritual symbols. Many of these masters simply wanted to share with others the revelations they had in an attempt to educate and awaken people.

When we analyze the teachings of these masters we find common dialogues, ideologies and philosophies on life and living. While the messages are communicated differently the underlying principles are similar. Are these masters one, simply showing themselves in different times, places, societies and forms? Have they come to help awaken and revitalize humanity to its true nature?

From Jesus who taught about righteousness, giving unconditionally; to Buddha who taught about suffering and set out a recipe for living a good life; to Mohammed who taught us to serve others, the importance of compassion, justice and equity; to Lao Tzu who understood nature and the beauty of its simplicity yet complexity; to Gandhi who inspired truth, solidarity and nonviolence; to the Dalai Lama who practices tolerance, love and happiness. There is one underlying theme these great masters espouse, that is of love and compassion for fellow beings. What defines a master? Let’s explore in more detail some of the teachings that the masters have relayed to us.

1. Living In The NOW, Being Present…

From a Zen parable. A man traveling across a field encounters a tiger. The man flees, the tiger chases after him. Coming to a precipice he grasps hold of the root of a wild vine and swings himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffs at him from above. Trembling, the man looks down to where, far below, another tiger is waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustains him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little start to gnaw away at the vine. The man sees a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucks the strawberry with the other, then falls to his death. How sweet it tasted on the way down! This is truly non-attachment and living in the moment.

Wisdom knows that there is nothing else except the moment, nothing else matters, that is all we have. Wisdom is in knowing there is no point being attached to anything. How often do we live for some other experience, time or moment that is not actually this moment? This is what all the great masters have taught; live in the present, live with compassion equity and gratitude. We can only experience the reality of mastery in the realm of the present, for it does not exist in the past. We can only experience love, compassion, the environment and the universe at this very moment. All else is an illusion. As the Buddha communicated, “Do not dwell in the past; do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

2. Simplicity & Non-Attachment Another Key To Mastery

    “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius

Simplicity is the key to mastery. Living simply is not ‘being simple’ as we know it. Simplicity is a state of being. It is a way of thinking, a way of looking at things, a way of expressing things, the way of doing things. All masters know that contentment and happiness comes through simplicity and non-materialism. The prophet Mohammed expressed that affluence leads to hedonism and hedonism leads to a life of constant craving and wanting. Buddha renounced materialism and likened people who chase after fame, wealth or other ego driven desires “like a child who licks honey from a blade of a knife. While tasting the sweetness of the honey the child risks hurting his or her tongue.”

Throughout time we have had many great teachers communicate to us the importance of living simple, non-material lives, so why do we disregard such advice? Do we know better than these great masters? Have we found the secret elixir of life in our consumerism? The great masters are telling us that we are living an illusion if we think we can live a life based around external gratification? We must look deeply and get in touch with our inner reality. We must reassess our priorities and purpose of life if our species is to survive.

3. Living With Compassion & Gratitude

    “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama

The word compassion comes from the Latin root that means suffering with or co-suffering. To show compassion is to express empathy or suffer with another. In its ultimate form compassion and gratitude are the realization that there is no separation between things. The ancient Eastern teachers see love and compassion as a quality that can be developed and harvested. It is an underlying inner power intrinsic to our true nature. Compassion is closely linked with our consciousness and wisdom. If we are aware of and let go of all worldly obsessions, then we are free to experience the truth of life. Ego can be a controlling influence on our lives that limits us from experiencing true compassion. Once we let go of this ‘ego state’ we can then start to experience our true self and embrace all beings with love and compassion. The below summation from the Dalai Lama, details the virtues of compassion.

“Compassion without attachment is possible. True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Because of this firm foundation, a truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively. Genuine compassion is based not on our own projections and expectations, but rather on the needs of the other: irrespective of whether another person is a close friend or an enemy, as long as that person wishes for peace and happiness and wishes to overcome suffering, then on that basis we develop genuine concern for their problem. This is genuine compassion. For a Buddhist practitioner, the goal is to develop this genuine compassion, this genuine wish for the well-being of another, in fact for every living being throughout the universe.”

4. Mastery is Clarity

    “I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.” – Vincent van Gogh

Have you ever had one of those moments Van Gogh is talking about? Everything is crystal clear, life and all that goes with it becomes apparently obvious for the first time. Then just as quickly as it dawned upon us, it disappears into the ether, leaving us questioning how we can make this a permanent state of being.  Masters are very clear and unwavering in their commitment to a philosophy of life. With clarity comes incredible power and freedom. For most, clarity eludes us. We go around choosing opposing things, this confuses us. This internal state of conflict sends out messages to the universe and the subconscious mind. We end up living in a world of disharmony. This creates disillusion, suffering and leads to negative states of being. With these conflicting messages it is easy to see why people spend much of life unfulfilled and in a constant state of confusion and frustration. Mastery knows that once a clear and decisive course is taken we can move toward our true destination. The master knows there are many paths that lead to the same destination, they have a very clear purpose in life. Mastery involves being able to respond to obstacles and difficulties that present themselves, yet being able to remain unwavering in adversity.

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OneLove

:::MME:::

A Virus Called Fear

Very few people understand the programming of fear and why it distorts our perceptions. While fear is a program used for our survival, fear also creates irrational beliefs that cause larger systems of fear like politics, religion and the media. “A Virus Called Fear” is a short film about the conditioning of fear, and what irrational fears can lead to. Connect the dots..... 

OneLove

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