Speak Truth To Power

Speak truth to power. Speak the truth and you will win, no matter how powerful the opposition. For truth IS the ultimate power. That is why others wish to silence you.

Those who seek power, as they always have been, are ultimately without a truth of their own. They erect straw men, false representations of the truth, in order to hold on to their illusions of being in charge. Their arguments are empty rhetoric combined with threats. They seek to confuse the issues but truth is a knife that cuts through such arguments.

Speak truth bravely because those who would wish to rule want you to fear. But truth has nothing to fear, no reason to run or hide. When you are afraid seek comfort in the truth. Do not attempt to utter any truth that makes you fearful, for that is not the truth. When you have the truth the truth will have you. It will remove the fear that keeps you timid. It will insist on being shared with others, so much so that it will overcome whatever fear holds it back.

The truth is not a weapon to be used against others, it is a gift to be shared. Truth is a spark that resides in all people’s hearts, and the sight of it in one will alight the bravery of all. And when the truth is shared, then fear will vanish.

Words change worlds. Think of all the money that is spent on advertisement, all the money that is put towards changing your opinion. People want to shape your opinions so that you will see through their eyes rather than your own. They want you to doubt yourself so that you will trust them. Never trust a stranger—someone who wants to lead you—more than you trust yourself. And if someone asks that of you it is a good indication they are not trustworthy.

We need to keep things on a human level, need our sense of smell to be as much a part of the equation as numbers on a spreadsheet. Factory farms would not pass the smell test, and yet dollars and cents allow them to exist. Abstract reasoning rationalizes away what is so obvious to those who experience it. We need human values, not government values or corporate values. Once we belong to a corporation or a nation we are no longer fully human.

Thou shall not kill is a human value, but corporations and governments find ways around this. They come up with compelling arguments for why we as a group must do what we as individuals never would.

Be a human. Be yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to be anything different. And then look around at others and realize they are humans too. Realize they have love and hope and all the good things that reside in you, and if they act otherwise, it is only because religion, politics, or some other propaganda machine has made them behave in such a manner. But they are still human beings underneath all the sick ideas that have been pumped into their heads. We can reach them, make them loving caring people, if we do not surrender to the ideas of hatred and division ourselves.

Remember, truth is merely good news we cannot wait to share. It is a gift that we are fortunate enough to be able to impart. But it would be vain of us to believe that we own it so completely as to be able to determine how others receive it. We must give it away, not demanding anything in return. We must share it, realizing our supply only grows greater when we do so. It is a precious gift, too precious to dilute it with fear or expectation. Such things are poison to those who receive it, and who could be expected to show gratitude for such a gift? It is only the gift freely given that can ever be expected to be freely received. 

Guns: A Buyer's Market

     Do you remember the fear leading up to January 1, 2000? There was the concern that since years were encoded in computers in only two digits that the flipover from 99 to 00 could cause chaos that could potentially shut down everything with a microchip in it. We were all a little bit nervous as we were ringing in the new year, the new millennium, that everything would go dark and we’d suddenly find ourselves back in the stone age. A lot of us stocked up on necessities, making sure there was a little extra food and water in the house.

     Some went overboard and bought generators, certain that society was going to break down. They were going to be the survivors, with all the Meals Ready to Eat, canned foods, water purification tablets, and whatever else survivalists store up in their special doomsday bunkers. And guns, lots of guns. Because if the world is falling apart, you want to make certain you don’t have to share with your unprepared neighbor. Darwin’s law, and all.

     All I can say is January 1^st must have been a great time to be in the market for a generator. When Y2K failed to materialize, there were a whole lot of people sitting on top of a whole lot of equipment they had no need for. Prices for such items must have bottomed out overnight.

     We’re looking at a similar situation coming up. You see, for years, people have been certain that President Obama was going to come for their guns. And a good many people have been preparing for that day, buying all the guns and ammunition they could afford in order to ensure that they would have enough when the time came that buying and selling guns would be outlawed.

     And gun sales are at an all time high, gun rights advocates are quick to point out how many are being sold as if it was a vindication that their convictions are correct. Because, of course, if everybody’s doing it, it simply must be right. As long as you are going along with the flock then you’re doing the right thing, right?

     The problem is we’ve seen it all before, oh so many times. It’s called a stock bubble. In the run-up to 2008, people were investing like mad in the real estate market, frightened that they were going to lose out by not throwing their money at any available plot of dirt with a shack on it. Except that all of the sudden the market turned on them and left a load of people with a bank loan on property that was greater than what  that property was now worth. And before that there was a silver buy up, and a tulip buy up, etc. In each case, a lot of people lost their savings on a craze that somehow seemed to sweep over society. The mob isn’t always right, in fact a lot of people get rich betting against them.

     The thing is, all you need to get a mob excited is to place a few fire-breathing demagogues in front of them to play upon their fears. Like a Sunday morning preacher caught up in the spirit, there’s always some attention whore willing to play to an audience, to get beyond their intellects and go straight for the emotions. And their patriotism, they always go for patriotism. So people like Ted Nugent whip up a lot of testosterone and convince people the enemy is at the gates, that the government is coming for your guns, and that’s just the start. So you better stockpile as much ammunition as you can before they come for your wife and daughter next.

     But what happens when the SWAT team doesn’t break down your door in the middle of the night and take all your guns? What happens when President Obama leaves office and the corner gun store is still open for business? What happens when a Republican gets into office and makes even more liberal gun laws than we have now (I mean liberal as in more tolerant. That’s what the word means, look it up if you don’t believe me)?

     I’ll tell you what happens. It will be Y2K all over again. Perhaps it won’t be an immediate rush to sell, but it will happen, whether quickly or slowly. It will happen, and people will start to think they’ve overspent on guns. Not that there’s such a thing as owning too many guns, I know, but most of us have other bills to pay. Eventually the wife is going to complain that she has nowhere to store stuff because your guns are all over the house. Maybe the wife might divorce you and you’re going to be strapped for money. Or maybe your interests might change and you’ll be wanting more room for your Downton Abbey collectibles or perhaps your L Ron Hubbard book collection. Eventually you are going to realize you have more guns than you could possibly fire in a lifetime and not enough money to buy a case of Hamms. You might deny you’ve overbought, but I know what such denials are worth. I once had a kid who assured me he was never going to regret buying all those Pokemon cards, that some day they would be worth a fortune. It didn’t happen.

     So someday you’re going to need cash more than you need guns. What will you do then? You’ll want to sell them, but who is going to buy them? All of your buddies were thinking the same thing you were, and now most of them have more guns than they know what to do with. The corner gun shop will only give you pennies on the dollar for the guns you bought from them, just like the jeweler shop with your ex-wife’s engagement ring. It aint right, but what are you gonna do? At any rate you’ve got guns and no money and you want beer or that cute tea set or a Precious Moments figurine or what have you, and all of the responsible gun owners already have too many guns in their gun closets.

     There’s still a market for all of those guns, people who are willing to pay good money for what you have. There are a lot of creepy people in this world and a lot of them like guns. And after all, it’s just not right that the gun store is only willing to give you fifty bucks for a gun you paid $500 for. So if you sell it to a stranger who might sell it to someone you don’t know who might knock off a liquor store, it’s not you who’s to blame, is it? Because after all, guns don’t kill people, people do.

     And maybe you are responsible enough not to sell your guns to less than savory elements. Others will. If you are a gun owner, you know another gun owner like this, in fact you probably know a lot of them. And a buyer’s market means a lot of people are going to be able to get their hands on guns they probably shouldn’t have. Because all guns start out as legal guns, criminals don’t make their own, and we’ve been making them and buying them like they’re the new Beanie Babies. So if Obama doesn’t come for your guns the realistic scenario is that a lot of those guns now in the hands of “responsible” gun owners are going be sold to or stolen by criminals, because that’s how criminals get guns. And if that doesn’t scare you, it does me.

War Or Peace

You cannot make war on war, you can only make peace on war. You cannot profess to fight for peace, only work for it. War and peace are alternative paths we can take, different kinds of behavior. They are opposite paths. It is a choice we must make, war or peace.

Once you commit to peace you must leave behind the weapons of war, the mindsets that permit you to see the other as the enemy. You must beat the swords into plows and start tilling the earth, plant seeds rather than attempt to burn the crops of your neighbor.

To believe in peace you must help your neighbor rather than withholding your help for fear of him using your vulnerability to harm you.

Make no mistake, when you choose war you have chosen war. You do not choose war in order to achieve peace. When you choose war you have abandoned peace. When you choose war you abandon the very ideas that make peace possible.

When you choose war you choose “me” over “us”. You choose fear over hope.

Even when war leads to victory it plants the seeds of future wars. No vanquished nation or people ever forgets their defeat. The wounds of war never heal. They fester, for years, decades, centuries, until the time for vengeance arrives. And that vengeance is but another justification for their enemy in times to come.

Peace is the planting of seeds for the future, an optimism. War is a succumbing to the immediate fear. A commitment to peace requires faith while war is a surrendering to the fear that is the basest instinct of our animal nature. It is the fallback, the final position when all else has failed, just as an ill-adjusted adult falls back to infantile patterns of behavior when confronted with a situation he cannot control. As one of Isaac Asimov fictional characters was fond of saying, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

The thing is, it may work for some…for a while. And from that, others deduce that it is a valuable tool or perhaps a necessary one, an ever-present threat to be held against others in order to entice them to the bargaining table. But show me the nation that has risen by war that has not fallen in the same manner. What works for the individual does not work for a nation. What works for the life-span of a human will devour a country in the span of several human lifetimes. And beyond that, what works for the individual is toxic for the whole. Humanity has endured through war not because it is an inevitability but because its scope has so far been limited. But larger and more destructive tools of mass-destruction have been filtering into more and more hands. With the greater proliferation of such weapons will come the increased desire to use war as a means of protection against such weapons. At some point the desire for individuals and nations to protect themselves will mean the end of us all.

There is no peace that war provides. Even those who believe in war have no ultimate answer as to how we can forever forestall nuclear war. They provide no vision of a nuclear-free future, no security. They offer only immediate actions to stave off whatever the most pressing problems might be. But the road they propose we take has only one endpoint. War leads to war, not peace. Choose now the path you wish to take.

Gratitude

     

The problem with fear is that it keeps you from appreciating how miraculous life is and how blessed you are. The time spent fearing and distrusting your fellow man is time not spent appreciating how they make your life not only better but possible. When you break things down into “us” and “them” then you fail to feel the gratitude you should for what they do for you.

     And make no mistake, gratitude is a wonderful feeling, as well as being an essential element for spiritual health. You cannot feel happy without feeling gratitude, one flows naturally from the other. And if you are incapable of gratitude, you will never know happiness.

     Some people are do-it-yourselfers, and I respect and admire that. I wish I was the kind who could build my own garage, re-wire my house, or grow my own food. But even the most self-sufficient of us requires the fruits of other people’s labor. Even those living out in the wilderness have with them possessions that were made by others, perhaps on the other side of the world.

     From time to time I might find myself lying in bed and aware of all of the work that has gone into the building of the house my wife and I am fortunate enough to call our own. I assure you that such an awareness brings a greater sense of gratitude than were my home a palace. Not only have people I never met put together the walls from timber and drywall, someone has cut down the trees so that other people at a mill might fashion the wood into proper building material. People have installed plumbing and electrical items whose component parts come from all corners of the world. Somebody mined the copper, somebody shipped it, while others transformed it into the wires that lay hidden within the walls and bring to me the miracle of electricity that is possible because of the people working at the power plant, using coal that was mined in Kentucky coal mines and shipped to us up Lake Michigan. And let us not forget those who repair the wires that bring the electricity to our houses, those who create the appliances it powers, etc.

     You see, we are incredibly interdependent. And we are all part of an immensely complex system. Even those who do not seem to contribute are still a part of it. And before we judge those we believe are not contributing sufficiently to the greater good, perhaps we should first ask ourselves if we are adequately rewarding those who do so much for us? Are we providing those who give us life-sustaining food an adequate piece of a pie that is large enough to provide for all? Is their work not as vital as any, and if so should they not be compensated accordingly? Not only those who own the land and the equipment but those who work long hours in the field. There are many working long hours in developing nations to provide the clothes and electronics we feel is our rightful payment for the work we do, and yet those individuals are not driving around in new cars. Often, they do not even have adequate shoes to walk where they need to get.

     But instead of appreciation for those who provide so much for us, we often fear and judge those whom we believe may be taking from us. When I think of all those who have worked to build the house I have, the books I read and music I listen to, gratitude takes the place of fear. Fear is a self-indulgence we cannot afford. And by fear I include hatred, for hatred is just a reaction of the fearful to those they fear.

     We are all in this together whether we like it or not. We are all going to survive because we have found a way to live together or we will perish because we have not. Demagogues try and turn one against the other, always for the benefit of a few who profit from all. It is our job not only to do the work that brings us our daily bread and the bounty we sometimes fail to appreciate, but to ensure that others who do their job are taken care of as well. That is what gratitude is all about, and it is not a burden but a source of joy. Life would not be so sweet nor rich without it.