Grief - My First Post In a Long Time

 

GRIEF - Thoughts on 2021 America

Let the words come out, that I need to say.

Grief is no doubt ingrained in my genes and soul is the pain and panic of a mother who had me in her womb while her nation,

The Netherlands, was occupied by Nazis during what was called the 1944 hunger winter, How my parents were  able to hold hope for a child to be born, while the future looked bleak,.

And now I am beginning to understand the looks on their faces when I would ask how things like Auschwitz could have happened. This, as I watch Nazis, Racists, and Q-Anon fanatics attack the center of our government with little resistance, almost assassinating our elected leaders.

Or, more recently, being reminded again of the thousands of children at our border, some in cages, while we insult those ‘Banana Republics’ for how they treat their people. Now we have to see our allies and ‘enemies’ laugh to see the depth of hypocrisy America has revealed.

As former educator, I also grieve the lack of critical thinking skills that would allow someone the tools to separate facts from fiction, as​ we go from facts as “Fake News” and Hoaxes as fact.​

Already back in March of last year, as the Pandemic caused major disruptions in our lives, I read a book by Albert Camus titled “The Plague” While fiction, it prepared my for the bizarre mix of attitudes for how to deal with such a pandemic. I understand that during times such as this, human beings lose confidence in their leadership because they can’t satisfy the needs of huge percentages of the population.

There is global suffering, because a virus is culling the herds, causing famines, requiring restrictive legal solutions, all the while living through a virtual hell, with a frying planet and a crashing economy which is hitting the very service sector underclass the worst.

And rather than trying to lead and solve the problem, politicians start Scapegoating, the Machiavellian solution to fomenting conflict so that the lying blamer can win.

But I thought America could rise above that. Am I mistaken?(People are afraid of loosing their prosperity, whites are afraid of losing their dominance)

It causes me even more grief, because as a naturalized citizen back in 1961 with my parents, I needed to assert that I would swear on the Constitution and believe in the myth of a perfect union, with separation of powers, the rule of law, and the ability of the majority to strongly influence the direction of the nation.

Although our entire history has been about trying to live up to our words and oaths in which all humans are created equal, instead, reality has dumped the majority of Americans, be they white or black, Asian or Hispanic, into desperation while some terrorist Wannabe’s want to overturn every legal expectation we were raised to respect as Patriots.​

Let’s be honest. Except for a few million Native American, most dying from our genocides of war and disease, all other Americans, including me, are immigrants from somewhere else on earth. And every wave of immigrants came because there was a shortage of cheap labor. So where is the base for all this anti-immigrant bullshit​.?​ As the Caucasian birthrate goes down, who else but Migrant laborers will grow the food and clean our buildings, cook and work in factories. From slaves to Italians, Irish, Mexican on and on, all abused upon arrival for a few generations until they could join the middle class.

So white supremacy? You mean those British and Dutch, and Germans first arrivals are so much more valuable than the Asians that built our railroads, or the many other North Americans who have crossed our southern border, (which we stole from them) to work under conditions most of us would avoid at all cost. And don’t forget those Catholics who intruded on the Puritan Christian Mind, and then they came for the Jews and Muslims. But as long as their skin was white and pink and the eyes were blue we could still all get along. I won’t even start on the treatment of Africans abducted for slavery and still struggling with the painful history and karma that came with the treatment of their ancestors.

So back to that word, Grief, yes, grief. You feel it when a loved one is dying, You feel it even when your favorite pet needs to be euthanized. But now it means watching the very nation and system​s of governing devolve into a “Banana Republic” with a Bonanza of lying plutocrats earning record profits while the other 80% of country  are hopeless, many homeless, and children feeling no future with record suicides and domestic violence. At least grieving is acknowledging that others are suffering, and allow me to empathize with the souls of my mother and father who became parents during one of the lowest moments of the 20^th century, but managed to bring me to North America to what was then, a land of opportunity and hope.

Grieving is in many ways accepting reality, and allowing even more of the illusions and propaganda of our upbringing to dissolve and be erased from the codex or our lives. I’m sure that historians and sociologists are smirking to a degree that they’ve seen all this coming for a long time. Apparently history does teach us that history doesn’t really teach us much that is useful to our times.

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It is now January 20, as I write, and despite every effort to subvert the American electoral system, we do have a new president. It gives me a little more willingness to move on from grief, and live life with a more positive attitude. Yes United We Stand, but divided we are failing.

And Now THIS!!!

            Terrified children torn from their mothers’ arms after horrendous conditions, refugees who must then witness the land of their dreams behave even more cruelly as the mafias or poverty they escaped.  This is an Alfred Hitchcock nightmare as infants to toddlers, boys and girls are torn away with no certain future…an event which will haunt them, and us, for the rest of their lives, and impact their own children.  How dare we allow people paid by us to isolate a virtually caged child in a kennel and treated with no compassion…and all this because a parent was trying to bring their child to a land of opportunity…if this doesn’t shred whatever final faith I had in The United States ‘propaganda’ I’d been fed in school and citizenship teacher then I couldn’t imagine what it would be…and I’m afraid to envision it.

But, this is not the first time America has tried ethnic cleansing through brutal means from Chinese Railway Laborers, to imprisoning all Japanese people who had jobs and homes and families and lost everything just because of their original nationality.  All waves of migrations, whether through slavery, colonial wars, and overflow from European countries in times of famines, wars, or political discrimination were abused upon arrival  and spent a few generations as second class citizens.

            To survive as a nation we cannot afford a scapegoated ethnicity, especially one that has long standing connections to this continent than any of the Caucasian invasions since Plymouth.   These people carry far more genes from the arrival of humans in North America than any one of us.

            All this to come back to the hypocrisy of a Political Party and Religious Old Testament Values Evangelical Cult pretending they believe in family values, and justify this cruelty by saying the Bible says you have to respect the law…illegal crossing over that line…and you’re done for.   Well, guess what, Jesus was crucified because he wouldn’t obey Roman Law.   And Christianity was born because he arose to spread humane values.

             I’m not even a parent at 75, but my eyes constrict and tears want to flow, I I feel powerless to intervene, and I would be dead if I walked up to the officer and tore the child away back to her mother where she belonged, which is what any decent good Christian Good Samaritan would feel compelled to do…

            America set the Nuremberg Trials AFTER WWII to punish generals who followed orders and obeyed the law that LED TO inhumane ethnic discrimination and thus should have ‘stood up’.  Excuse me?  Where is the Nuremberg Trial of today to judge what should be their sentence for crimes against family values, compassion, and doing unto others as we would have them do to us.  I guess that will only be left to St. Peter to decide.

The Black Hole

     The black hole, the concept of the black hole, the mystery of some barrier of time space, some boundary of reality as we can know it...something almost dark and, dare I say it, evil?


This actual scan of a sand dollar shell, in the sea urchin and starfish family with it's pentagonal tentacles all emanating from a central opening between the hard and the soft, the exoskeleton and the layer of 'skin' and the protected viscera inside.


This scan shows nearly infinite 'tentacles' or 'branching' etchings in a calcified 'shell', and when one looks at this 'non-living' specimen we can see how the entrance, the gateway, so to speak between our internal organs and our external needs of food and energy create a 'skeleton' of how living things interact with the planet...


Could the black hole of the universe be merely a sand dollar skeleton, could the calcified remains of a universe without an undulating black hole even have the potential for infinite existence?


So run my thoughts as I ponder this imprint of the tao, of the morphic resonance of life.

Digitally Visualizing Reality 

Standing at least 500 feet away, with a 30 powered optical zoom camera, I was able to capture the basic lines of this formation on the Icicle River this afternoon.  In my mind, it looked more like this, but because of the later afternoon flatter light, it was more of a monotone, like this:

The Little Time Bombs of Memories

Open a cigar box with old lead pencils, and a mysterious odor from another age wafts below my nose.

My engineer father before CAD Machines actually drew blue prints with pen and pencil, and even in post-war Amsterdam, where everything was sparse after the war, my father would bring me some of these pencils to play with, and I'd color while he drew hexagons and pentagons with his compass and ruler, or he would draw perspective in such things as ships.  We bonded around these pencils, we were at our best together...he the engineer, I the artist but both of us loved to play with the pencil, and I, a lad of 6 was permitted to be free to draw and color as I wanted.  

This stamp brings all that up, because it was one of the first stamps I ever paid money for.  I loved stamp collecting, because it gave me an understanding of the world, history, propaganda, time periods, colonialization, a word once the ring of a century, now no longer in the spelling checker.  So then books and knowledge creative play, Montesorri values, and an appreciation of beauty all began to sink in.  

The memories that moment of opening the box, the ambience of 1950 in the room, the ambience of my father, the mood of the moment, for a deep sniff into the box that all came alive...now I know how the dog experiences the moment...and then, from a drawer slip an old stamp album, and the many letters from my grandfather to remind me of them, and The Low Countries of my birth and early upbringing.

To Whom it May Concern:

             

             I’m in shock, disbelief…denial…of the tragic feelings I associated with Kennedy’s and ML  King’s assassinations, 9-11, and now the power grab of Donald Trump. What consequences will the imposition of this character on the world stage have?

              As an instructor, I taught citizenship classes to immigrants in the nationalization process, including my parents, who came legally in 1956.  We learned of the Balance of Powers of the Three Branches Of Our Government, the value of a Constitution and that the majority should rule, within a framework of a republic, not a democracy.  We were expected to be positive that this system would work.  There was a consensus that this government was about as good as we could have, and that there were a Bill of Rights and other amendments that we were told, would predict a more open, multi-cultural society with equal respect and Rights Regardless Of Race, Gender, Ethnicity Or Religious Belief. 

              As a historian and product of WWII, in Europe, I learned of the disasters that a psychotic dictator like Hitler or Mussolini inflicted on the world, and the power that came so easily because of the German depression caused by the punishment the world inflicted on Post WWI Germany, leading  to The NAZI rise.  My German sister-friend, endured the first years of her life in Eastern Germany listening to bombs and scrambling through the trenches to find food.  On the first day of Trump’s campaign she yelled,” Oh God, he reminds me of Hitler”, as she fought off her Post Traumatic Stress.

              The Devil Dragon of Patriotic Isolationistic Nationalism, which has been breathing fire for a while, has finally burned through the common sense of an interdependent mutually sharing species living on the same life raft requiring us to cooperate to save our planet, and not appeal  again to the xenophobic gene to get wealth from war preparation.  My father warned me in my youth, having survived two world wars himself, that the nationalistic gene fires up when there is too much competition for resources or wealth.  Machiavelli had it right: “Divide and conquer!” .  It worked, so in 1938 the smoldering European continent once again found fuel in religion, language, ethnicity and national identity to start another profitable war for the corporate class. Thus the pattern of fascism repeats: Create scapegoats through false accusations and appeal to hate and divisiveness.      

        Postwar, the Marshall Plan was America’s ingenuity to stabilize a war torn continent and create a mutually dependent economy that would lead to the need for uniting under one banner.  A United Nations was founded by America to help diplomacy overcome that warrior testosterone impulse to fight, with all of its divisive and horrific consequences.  Eisenhower, too, warned us not to let corporations and warfare set our agenda.

              Now, we suddenly find ourselves (in the words of David Brooks, a Republican himself) with a ‘narcissistic egotistical 5 year old’ brat who suckered enough of the lower white working middle class to give the 1% plutocrats the opportunity to retreat from the hard won civil rights of our history, and dig back into the “Take care of yourself, we’re not responsible, we don’t need you, stay where you are.” Yet, every step of both industrial and financial progress was made possible by those waves of immigrants from all over the world looking for something like the peace, stability, employment, and necessities their home country no longer afforded them.

              Besides toppling The Statue of Liberty, he also has designated the most contrary staff to manage the very department they despise.  The blatant ignorance of an already educational dysfunctional system, which she will privatize,  and then home schooling and including religious schools back in play in a country of ‘Separation Of Church And State”  Suddenly we’re back to arguing over evolution and science, logic and reasoning, and the cognition necessary to distinguish a world of “alternative facts” from truth.

              Then add suggestions he could get away with shooting someone, insulting patriots like John McCain and the Kahn Family losers, resorting to ‘pussy grabbing’ and shaming the handicapped.   The “system” has either been paid off, or is too cowardly to pursue Trump University, and several rape charges not to mention huge conflicts of interest. 

              Sure, I could definitely support returning key industries to be more accountable to local taxation, and I do believe that a sustainable future will require more and more local adaptations to a rapidly changing planet.  But if that’s going to be accomplished with coal, logging, petroleum and other harmful chemicals then this man is in violation of the one divine command that life requires, Each Specie Should Be Seeking The Most Positive Future To Further Its Own Species, To Find Habitat And Resources.  Now I know most homo sapiens are never satisfied but if there is no leadership willing to educate and act upon ‘facts and truth’, then we have entered another era that will only further the collapse of global civilization and our very planet.

              So, the challenge for those of us who are horrified, and we are the majority of the population, if not the Electoral College “Cowards”, we find ourselves in a world where even speaking up for the rights of others has almost become a crime, and the line between peaceful and violent protests virtually disappears.  The very technology upon which our world is dependent is vulnerable to a loss of our control, yet like 1984, we’re being monitored.  What does that leave?

              We must defend our right to speak our mind, and to defend the fundamental Bill of Rights upon which this nation agreed to unite.  Somehow, our checks and balances must be strengthened so that one administration cannot simply overturn the last 75 years of progress making all humans equal..

              Meanwhile we need to overcome the denial that we have entered a new era in American history, one that 1984 and Brave New World had prophesied:  Propaganda and distractions as a means of brainwashing the populace into apathy and resignation.  At last the sales of “1984” are surging again.

Peter M. Prehn

A supermoon deserves respect as my need to  express my frustration with an appropriate sense of sarcasm

The decision to drive this model of governance by a majority of electors removes all faith I had in the checks and balances o

To expect, to wait, and to hope are all meanings for the Spanish word, esperar.

I’m grieving the death of the final remaining illusions I had of the inherent value of a republic, or an electoral system where the minority actually got to rule.  The success of the racist divisive party to achieve the control they now have over our nation, and the threats to our human rights, education, labor unions, women’s rights, gay rights, and national health care, not to mention corporate deregulaltion and deglobalization.  Then there's to complete disregard for life on earth, or the future generations with no viable path to success.

These threaten the foundations of all I was taught as a student becoming a citizen of America in 1960 as an immigrant kid from Holland.

Obama gave us some hope.  We expected more, but now we shall definitely simply have to wait.

My gut tells me we’re on the threshold of a new era in human relations, and I fear it may be a reversal of the humanism of the past.

The globally intertwined world is trying to sever some ties by propagandizing nationalism and by appealing  to the tribal gene.  Divide and conquer.

I sense the feelings that my Dutch parents must have had when Adolf Hitler came to power…a man who used  the crowd tactic and hate to gain power over others with the superman German propaganda.

I myself have found tears draping forth, despite my seven decades of political disappointment, and can only compare these feelings with the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or  the news of 9/11.

Certainly the lack of respect, abuse, civility in American politics has been trumped by this candidate, the worst in American history, and yet the uneducated white males of our more rural regions were able to overcome the actual majority of Americans .

I have definitely had anxiety with every election and rarely have things been as on edge as they are now, as our society is already lashing back at those fighting for equality, but rarely has a president sponsored racial and ethnic divisiveness so directly in his words.

It is the end of my own American dream, as a child immigrant to America, in the McCarthy era and patiently watch equality spread to every race, culture, and gender…finally recognizing women as equal humans, and struggling to implement the ideal of the American Dream ‘equal opportunity and respect for all’  which our teachers tried to implant in our values.

Every step forward and backward has been observed, and just as we thought we had reached respect for every sub-culture in our society but are working on giving equal opportunity to all.  

We have gotten caught up in the overpopulation, globalistic economics, resource diminishing, climate change, and the results are sparking the tribes and clans to claim their own turf, culture, life style...

Uncertainty drives innovation, and innovation in times of crisis is to hook up with locals and neighbors and share resources.

The future has always had a dark side, from the atomic bomb, to immigrants taking over Americ from the natives.  Consequences are not always understood until they take affect...Karma is the term for that...our generation has had some of the moste prosperous and luxurious life styles, mostly white, educated and preferred.  Now we shall have to account for those who do no longer see themselves as members of the same society.