An Apology To A Cardinal (And To Birds In General)

At six o’clock Saturday morning I heard the song of a cardinal. I thought it rude of him to be so noisy so early in the morning and felt that he owed me an apology for waking me up on my day off. But by 9 o’clock as I was hanging my laundry to dry, hoping to enjoy a peaceful morning, my tranquility was disturbed by a neighbor’s air compressor, and another neighbor’s motorcycle. At that point I understood it was we humans who owed him an apology.

Soon after, I took my bike for a ride, the streets for the better part silent due to the pandemic. I heard a woodpecker at work, as well as the calls of other birds I could not recognize. Like many of my kind, I have spent more time in factories than I have in nature. I can recognize the voices of countless celebrities, but few birds, can tell you who sang thousands of songs I don’t even like, but can put a beak to very few bird songs.

But in the relative silence, I hear many birds’ voices now. They seem to be speaking to me, asking if we cannot maintain the silence we’ve been engaged in of late. I would be glad to oblige, but my voice too gets drowned out by the noises of the factories and the voices on the radio and television. My voice is heard no more than the birds, and is far less appealing.

Sadly, I know what is coming. In a matter of weeks. When the summer they have waited so long for will hit full stride, not only will the countless aural annoyances civilization has produced return in full force, but another horror will be unleashed upon them. The 4th of July is not far away, a time when children and adults alike will be playing with their trauma-inducing fireworks. I feel bad enough for my dog, who slinks down into the cold, dark basement every time one surprises her. But the birds have nowhere to go. Their homes, their places of safety, are the trees, and they are no refuge from the noise and the explosions.

Still and all, I am amazed they are willing to take up residence in my neighborhood. I’m amazed at how much nature still exists in the places where we’ve done our best to pave it over. I look out front to see the birds gathered around the feeder I had bought for my mother and inherited when she passed. There are many times I look back and think of how I could have done more for my mom, but in this instance, I feel that I gave her a special gift. I think of her alone, as I am now, listening to all the sounds of birds, appreciating the beauty and joy nature provides. I hope that someday when I am home-bound, someone thinks to place a bird feeder near my window.

It is an amazing thing to travel far to see the natural wonders of the world, but there is something equally beautiful in appreciating the little miracles that flutter around us.

If they could just sleep in a little later. 

Does Genius Exist In The 21st Century?

There are people so brilliant that their genius can be detected in a single one-sentence quotation. Read a random quote from Oscar Wilde, for example. 

There are people so intelligent that their brilliance is apparent in virtually every single thing they say or write. Pick up any novel, short story, or essay by Jack London and be prepared to be impressed. 

The genius of some people bleeds over from their areas of expertise into whatever subject they speak on. Einstein is one such person. I can’t even begin to understand what he’s saying when it comes to physics, but he manages to impress me when he speaks about the human condition or politics, among other things. 

In short, when I see genius, I don’t have to have someone tell me how brilliant that person is: it hits me on a visceral level.

I have never read a quote from Bill Gates that in the least impressed me. Perhaps he is a genius when it comes to developing software, I’ll leave that to people more versed in the field than I. But when it comes to stepping outside his area of expertise, he does not impress me in the slightest. The only thing I’ve witnessed is the mutterings of a mediocre mind. I’ve read his book suggestions and not once have I seen a book among them that suggested Bill Gate’s reading list has anything of value to offer society.

So why is his name mentioned at all when it comes to the current pandemic? Has he gone back to school and finally got a degree in something, in medicine or virology perhaps? Why should I or anyone else care what he has to say? Who made him an authority on anything, and why does the world require his leadership? Who are today's arbiters of genius?

In fact, I would go as far to say that there is not a single person in the public eye at present who demonstrates anything I would say is clear, unmistakable genius. Thomas Friedman is always being held up before me as a great thinker. He can be clever, I’ll give him that. But his cleverness is more often used to rationalize than to elucidate. And history, I'm convinced will not be kind to his central theses.

Who else do we see on television or in print that could even be considered for the designation of “genius”? Neil deGrasse Tyson? Again, he’s assuredly intelligent in his field, but does that intelligence translate outside of it? A huge step up from Bill Gates, but hardly comparable to an Einstein, who was in turn also a much greater figure in science. Who, then?

I am almost tempted to turn to comedians to fill the void. They alone seem to be able to look beyond the rather narrow parameters of vision current society is stuck in. Among them, among those the mainstream admits exists, I would point to John Stewart as the closest there is. And he, sadly, has bowed out of the public eye, perhaps realizing that the public eye was winking shut on anyone willing to stare boldly at the truth of things. Not too long ago, I would have included Stephen Colbert, but the last couple years have shown that there is something lacking in him that anyone who might be considered to have genius must possess. A person of genius must be uncompromising in looking at the heart of the matter, of getting to the truth no matter how uncomfortable or unpopular the truth might be. That is not Stephen Colbert.

Where then, can we find the thoughts of genius we need in order to elevate our own thinking, and in turn elevate the way we interact with and improve the world in which we live? Fortunately, we can reach back in time, for the past is replete with the collected thoughts of those in touch with genius. To list a few would show my biases, but you can’t go wrong with the classics. You really have not need to go past the age of Christ to find genius from many sources around the world.

But is genius to be forever relegated to that past? Is there no room for it here in the 21^st Century? The answer is no, there is not. At least it is not to be found in corporate media. Think about it: how many times have you heard the voices of Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi on television? If the media cannot even acknowledge accepted genius, what chance is there they will ever permit the voices of present genius?

Genius does exist, however. It exists where it has always existed in eras where the truth is avoided because it contradicts authority: on the periphery. Not only does it exist, I’d go so far to say it is thriving. Again, I could list a lot of names of people who impress me with not only their intelligence but also with their determination to pursue truth beyond the stagnant accepted parameters. I could go with a well-seasoned mind like Chris Hedges, or youngish but vibrant minds like Niko House or Jamarl Thomas. If you want your intelligence and integrity to be served up with a healthy dose of humor, I’d say Jimmy Dore.

But if you want my pick for someone whose writing belongs beside any acknowledged voice of genius throughout history, I’d go with Caitlin Johnstone. She is everything I mentioned in the first paragraph. You can detect genius in a single sentence. You can see it sparkle in just about anything she writes. And while she is prolifically writing daily political articles, you see her genius spill over into her poetry, her drawings, her philosophical, psychological, and spiritual musings.

Check her out. See what genius looks like in the 21^st Century. Because you’re not going to find it in the Washington Post or CNN.

What Will Our Future Be?

What will our future look like? Don’t scurry around looking for the opinions of experts. Our experts have failed us. You’re the expert now, what do you think?

More than that, what do you feel? What do you want? What do you want our future to be?

When someone asks you what the future will look like, you might get images of Mad Max or The Matrix, but those images have been implanted into the fear receptors in your brain. Even if you have thought those ideas on your own, you have never desired them to come to be.

What do you want the future to look like? For all of us, for humanity and for all the animals that are trapped on this planet with us? What do you want for your children and their children? What do you want people in the future to think of us?

You know how this works on a personal level. Everyone knows that if you eat right, if you brush and floss regularly, exercise, save money and work hard, your future will be much more pleasant than if you do not take care of yourself or plan.

But you are part of an ecosystem. Just as a healthy plant cannot thrive in an unhealthy environment, neither can you thrive in a poisoned ecosystem no matter how you tend to your own health. You will never truly be happy or healthy so long as you neglect the environment in which you live. How healthy will our future environment be?

You’re writing the script even as you read this. Your smallest decisions are determining the future that is coming. It is impossible to know whether your largest efforts will bear fruit, it is true. But it is also impossible to know that your smallest choices will not bear fruit you never would have believed possible. As with the choices you make for your personal wellbeing, it is the day-in, day-out routines you establish which will block by block build the future you desire.

It's easy to feel helpless. We’ve been trained to feel helpless, trained by those who feel helpless inside and try to feel powerful by making others feel miserable.

You can feel helpless if that is what you want, but feeling helpless feels horrible. It’s better to feel helpful, powerful, meaningful.

That’s a choice. It’s a habit. It’s an attitude. You just decide you’re going to look for ways to make the future like how you want it to be. You just find ways that you’re making the world worse and find alternatives. You find one tiny little thing that you were doing before, and decide you don’t have to do it. Think of one small bit of your own power you were giving to soulless institutions or bullies that insisted you had to do things the way they told you, and take it back.

Do it. Find some tiny scrap of change you can make, and then ask yourself if feeling powerful doesn’t feel better than feeling helpless. Embrace the glorious feeling of being able to do something that is good for the universe, and all of the sudden new ideas will occur to you. And each time you embrace such an idea it will make you feel good in a way you had long stopped believing was possible. Feel your power and you will soon realize that those who took it from you or told you you couldn’t have it weren’t your friends. Feel your power and you realize you will never let them take it from you again. There is nothing they can threaten you with, because they cannot threaten you with anything worse than that feeling of helplessness that had been eating away at your gut.

The future is in your hands. What will it look like?

Like my writing? Please follow me on Twitter, sign up for my newsletter, or check me out on Amazon. Facebook is no longer a guaranteed way for me to share my thoughts and writing.

I Speak For The Dead

It's always a dangerous thing to attempt to speak for others, but sometimes the attempt must be made. Those who have a voice must speak out against the injustices perpetrated against those who have none. People need to speak out against problems even when the victims themselves are unaware. Just because someone does not have a voice does not mean they have nothing to say.

As for me, I feel I must speak for the dead.

I feel the need to give voice to those who have passed on, our elders who are no longer around to give us their wisdom.

It is risky, channeling the voices of those who raised us, those who guided us through our early years and shared with us their principles and beliefs. It is even harder to attempt to speak for those we have only heard about, those who passed out of existence before we were ever born. And yet their stories were passed on to us, at least parts of them. I can only approximate what they would say, but I feel they would want me to make the attempt. Their lives had meaning, their experiences can guide us even as we make our way through a world quite different than the one they knew. 

I see many of the things my parents tried to teach me differently now that I am approaching the age I knew them to be. Some of what they told me makes more sense now, some of it has not proven to be wisdom. I do not judge them, they did the best they could to point me in a positive direction. But they did a good enough job that I would dearly love to be able to talk to them now, to hear their opinions on the issues I am facing and the issues our society is facing. Most of us think we'd have a good idea of what our parents would say if they were around today, but I’m guessing for most of us our understanding of what our parents believed was fashioned by our younger selves, that if we were able to speak with them now our understanding of what they were trying to teach us would grow deeper and would better be able to guide us in the present.

And for me, at least, I would love to hear their opinions of the society in which we live now. I’m guessing it would be different than what we’d expect, because we are creatures of our current environment and they were creatures of theirs. I can’t help thinking that if we would show what we consider to be modern marvels to many of our ancestors, they would consider them abominations. If we were to show them our water parks, they would ask “But where are the open fields, where are the woods?”

We are in an era where the present is constantly with us, where we are unable to touch the timeless because the outside world has infiltrated our homes. Newsmen and advertisers, social media and video games are working from within our places of sanctuary, demanding our attention, and while we connect with these electronic devices, we are disconnecting from any link we once had with our past, with our ancestors, and with the perspective that those of another era might be able to give us.

I challenge you to step out of the present for a moment. Find an old magazine where the pictures look different, where the color scheme is not what you’re used to. Grab an old novel and really feel where the author was coming from in an era that once wrote letters and waited days and weeks for a reply. Seek to understand a different culture, which after all is really your culture, your heritage.

Watch an old movie, where most store managers were actually store owners, where people went shopping in a dress shirt and tie instead of pajama bottoms. You don’t have to agree with the way everything was back then but you should at least attempt to understand it. And don’t watch a new movie that takes place in another era, because it will be filled with the biases of our own age.

Visit an antique store or a museum, gaze upon the tools people once used. Gaze upon an old lamp and consider how not only the technology but the perspective on how things were made was so different.

Gaze at an old picture, and see what it can tell you. Who were they, what would they say to us, what did they know that we did not?

Get connected to those who came before you. Because it is only in knowing who they were, the good and the bad, that you will have any real understanding of who YOU are. Pour through your memories, reflect upon what you can remember of them, reappraise what you understood when you were young and permit yourself to see the past in light of the present. Do this until you feel you now understood them better than you ever did before. Then let them speak through you. Their voices deserve to be heard.

Like my writing? Please follow me on Twitter, sign up for my newsletter, or check me out on Amazon. Facebook is no longer a guaranteed way for me to share my thoughts and writing.

Random Thoughts Part 29

If people were aware of how fun thinking is, I’m convince they would do much more of it. I cannot begin to tell you how amusing it can be to pick apart an official narrative in order to have the absurdity reveal itself to you.

The cancer inside of us screams its warning at the threat of the scalpel that lies without.

When you are able to understand the complicated, you have become intelligent, but it is only when you can relate it to the simple that you have become wise.

To the degree that you wall yourself off from the common person, you cannot claim to be for the people. If you live in a gated community that keeps out the average Joe, you are not what most would consider an American. You are foreigners. You are occupiers.

We waste our precious resources creating things that don’t make us happy, and we waste the precious hours we are given working to pay for them.

When I was young I would throw a rock into the water to see what kind of splash I could make. Now I am content to admire the placidity of the surface that mirrors back to us all that is.

The argument “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” makes as much sense to me as a weightlifter saying “If you’re so smart why can’t you bench 400?” Both require a degree of knowledge, no doubt, but being intelligent usually precludes an obsession with such goals.

A nation of people who only care about their own rights will soon find that only they care about their own rights.

Have you ever had the feeling you were in an old-school video game? Where people wait until you approach before stepping in your way? And when you take the time to talk to them, they repeat the exact same lines no matter how many times you encounter them?

I think of when I feel happiest in life, and it is invariably when I hear leaves rustling or waves lapping or the crunching of snow, when I encounter the smell of flowers or the sea, when I feel the sun or a gentle breeze upon my skin. Only nature is capable of providing true contentedness, and yet we make ourselves miserable searching for contentment elsewhere, destroying nature as we go.

If people were aware of how fun thinking is, I’m convince they would do much more of it. I cannot begin to tell you how amusing it can be to pick apart an official narrative in order to have the absurdity reveal itself to you.

People don't die from lack of art, cultures do.

I think it was easier for country folk to appreciate city folk when they made tractors and trucks. It is increasingly difficult to say just what city dwellers do for those who provide their food.

I have noticed on special occasions such as Christmas, when we make a point of being nice to each other and feeling love for our fellow man, we for the most part succeed.

Anyone who sees the problem is in another and not in himself, is part of the problem. Anybody who believes himself to be part of a group immune to sin, error, and ignorance, draws a fictional dividing line.

In the battle between truth and power, truth will invariably triumph, but the casualties can be immense, the damage unhealable.

Within every aging person somewhere lies the reassuring notion that they well may be old enough to check out before the shit hits the fan.

To truly be an adult, it is not enough to be able to merely take care of yourself, you must take part in maintaining and furthering the society to which you belong.

Fools are in the majority, and they never lack confidence because a fool believes that the majority is always right.

Fake Steak Sucks

Sometimes I think of how nice it must feel to believe that one of the two major parties is actually on your side, fighting for issues that matter to you. To believe it arrogance to think that the future might ever depend upon anything you will ever think, believe, say, or do. To believe that the future we all need will be ushered in by individuals born to lead and to rule, people we need only give our approval to. To sit on the sideline and shout our encouragement to those who battle it out in the arena for our benefit. 

But I have experienced that delusion, and I know that it has never made me happy. Because while I can lie to my conscious self, I know that I can never lie to my true self, my real self, my soul. While I tell my thinking mind that everything is okay and a certain breed of supermen and superwomen are shaping humanity's destiny as God or destiny instructs them, some part of me knows it is merely a story I tell myself in order to avoid speaking up, acting up, rising up. Holding on to such illusions has only ever caused me pain.

I am reminded of the traitor from The Matrix, the one who regrets having been awakened to the truth and is willing to betray all his friends and comrades in order to retreat to the security and small pleasures to be found in the illusion of the matrix. But I know, as one who used to eat fake food in the matrix, that it is better to experience all the horrors reality can inflict upon us for a brief taste of something real.

Awakened, I taste the fruits that I have raised in my meager little garden, recognizing them for the little miracles they are. I cherish each genuine connection that I have with other humans, recognizing them as part of the miracle of existence. I drink in the poems and prose, the lyrics and the music, the paintings and the movies made by those in touch with something beyond the matrix—and in turn I am in touch with the miraculous. And I realize that what I call miracles are merely those moments where I am face to face with reality, the matrix no longer standing between me and the awesome universe. Once one has experienced miracles—which is to say, once one has opened oneself up to miracles, to reality—one need never again fear gazing into truth. And once one has done that, the matrix no longer has appeal, offers no joy, no temptation. Having stepped outside the illusions, life is nothing but miracles.

Random Thoughts Part 28

If you’ve been certain that Putin had pee tapes he was holding over Trump’s head but never once considered that Jeffrey Epstein might have something similar on him, your opinions are not your own but mere echoes of what the media has told you.

Flint drinking water: Obama didn’t fix it. Trump Didn’t fix it. The next president isn’t going to fix it. Don’t even try to voter shame people. Why would anybody in Flint vote for a candidate that can even provide water?

In the transition from words in physical form to words we read on electronic devices, we lose two very important aspects of reading: 1. A book does not offer you a world of cheap distractions the way anything connected to the internet does and 2. Words on paper cannot be changed, whereas news articles etc. are constantly rewritten as soon as the words and ideas prove the writer a liar or a moron.

What did we intend to do differently in Syria than we did in Libya, which left that country a smoldering wreck and a haven for terrorists where open-air slave markets thrived?

In the relationship between humans and cell phones, I’m fairly certain which is the master.

Anybody who would pay $1.50 for a bottle of water is a moron and anybody who would sell it at that price is evil.

The problem with capitalism is that it is run by capitalists.

My expectations of the world are so low it would not surprise me to hear that Adam Sandler was making a sequel to Jack And Jill.

A lot of time we see the packaging and assume there must be an actual product. We look at the politician and automatically think he must stand for something. We think with so many words and such passion in their voices that there must be some importance and meaning somewhere, and that the problem lies with us for not understanding them. We seem to have forgotten that marketing was once able to make Pet Rocks a fad.

The atheist has a way of blaming God for allowing evil to exist while absolving man.

The Earth is you mother, not your whore.

From here on out, I’m totally okay with giving every U.S. President who doesn’t get us involved in a nuclear war a Nobel Peace Prize.

When the media says they looked into Biden’s son’s business deals in Ukraine and found no wrongdoing, who is “they”? Who decided that profiteering in a country where your dad helped overthrow a democratically elected government and install their own puppets is okay?

It costs a lot to live in our society even if you’re poor, because our society was not created with the poor in mind. No one can live a simple life, even if that is their preference. We don’t have a freedom to live as we choose, we only have the freedom to live as a rich person would choose.

The heart is capable of understanding what the intellect cannot, but it requires patience. Wisdom breathes deeply, slowly. But we live in a world where we only have time to understand with our minds, and even then we are fed information so quickly we don’t have time to sift through the information. So it is not even our intellect that is in charge of our decisions but the 5-second response aspect of our consciousness. This is the most primitive part of our psyche, and the most easily manipulated. It is not an accident our society has come to be shaped in this way.

Numbers don’t lie and guns don’t kill, but put numbers in the hands of a liar or a gun in the hands of a killer, and you have a bad situation on your hands.