Dear fellow Oakland protesters, and others.

The type of legitimate protesters I went to join

Dear fellow protesters in Oakland, thank you for coming. I know you’re angry, so to not waste your time I’ll get to it:

What is the point? Your point. Your purpose. Your goal. Why are you here?

Are you here to express your frustration with race and class relations in this country, advocate for justice and change, and oppose the militarization and impunity of a segment of the police?

Or do you just want to burn shit?

Because the two are mutually exclusive. Standing for the former entails NOT doing any of the latter, and doing the latter destroys the voice of the former.

Are you here to protest, or riot? They are fundamentally different. Is your enemy hate crime, or Starbucks? Do you want to build something better, or just smash what’s here? Do you want to oppose those responsible, or just harm your neighbors?

My opinion? This War on Trash Cans accomplishes nothing but toxic fumes. This aggression towards all police officers does nothing but further inhibit dialogue and progress. I see demonstrators and police pushing each other into simplified extremism, and it makes me sad. I’ve known good cops. Men and women who I was glad were there to back me up.

When will you learn that violence does not have the effect you wanted it to when you were an angry 16 year old? It’s time to grow the fuck up.

Just an excuse for their ugly little tags

As you may have guessed, angry violent “protester”, I am sick of your shit. You are not a protester. You are a hooligan. And I will not stand by you. So tonight, as the helicopters again drift overhead, despite my desire to finish what I’ve started and demonstrate my conscience, I am staying home. It’s not because I’m scared, not afraid of being arrested again, but because last night looked to me like a movement degraded, a legitimate grievance lost in petty vandalism, and I will not participate in that, even tacitly.

To those actual protesters, both previous night, and probably tonight too, I thank you for caring. Apathy is the great enabler of discord and abuse.

And to those who have come to Oakland to hide behind your coward’s mask and make trouble in someone else’s community… Violence breeds violence, so please don’t tempt me.

Oakland Protest Night 2; I wasn't expecting that.

Always with the fire, but it seemed lackluster

Helicopter buzzards hung above Oakland tonight, again. I barely slept last night, was dead on my feet at 5:00 this afternoon, was freezing, and still kind of hungry after finishing my leftovers. I didn’t really feel like going out to monitor the protest again tonight. But I believe something important is going on in America right now, a nation crying out for change, for hope, for progress, so I added a thicker layer and rode downtown.

Hipsters sipping cocktails where last night wafted clouds of tear gas, but those rotary buzzards drew me to Telegraph Ave, where crowds stood around, calmer than last night. It just felt like a lot of spectators. Fine with me, I wanted a short night.

Why did they need guns
like that out?

The police seemed edgier, with some rushing around with guns leveled at people, the way the military guys on TV said one should never do. But things seemed to calm down. The police cleared Telegraph, and I let them, moving to a cross street, 40th Ave.

Then I saw it. Some jackass had brought a circular saw blade. I’d been surreptitiously kicking chunks of asphalt into the bushes all night, lest some hothead be tempted to throw them through a cruiser’s window, or worse yet, at a cop. But this? Best case scenario: someone would blow out a tire tomorrow. Worst case scenario: someone lost in anger and mayhem might throw it at a cop. But if I picked it up, touched it, might they bust me for possession of a weapon? That quantity of police presence makes you think about such things.

I thought twice before picking it up.

I took of photo of it in situ, just in case, then picked it up, two steps, and tossed it into the burned-out wreckage of a dumpster. Phwew, that was as intense as the night was going to get.

The cops decided to move us further down 40th, and I complied, walking when they walked, then when they cried “double time!” I jogged ahead of them to stay out of the way. We reached a crosswalk and the order to “hold up” rang out. I crossed over to my side and slowed to a walk.

I was only a couple blocks from my most famous friend, a travel writer who inspired me to the craft. I considered texting to see if he wanted to come out, but was exhausted and wanted to go home, so was considering how to loop around to reclaim my bicycle.

That’s when they arrested me.

My last exposure, moments before my arrest

A deputy chief, scalp shiny as the skinheads of nightmare, charged towards me shouting “YOU! You’re under arrest! You are under arrest!” I thought he was talking about the teenager behind me, who had been sandbagging a bit when the cops pushed us down the street, which seemed unfair, but no, he was talking about me, charging at me. I was under arrest for being in the area of an unlawful assembly, penal code 409.

Two officers stepped forward and pinned my arms at my sides. Took me to a van, hands against it, thorough search, zip-corded my hands behind my back. I spoke with them respectfully, letting them know I was not going to cause any trouble, just as I had not all night. They marched me to a shattered bus stop where half a dozen kids sat with hands pinned behind their backs.

They were going to take us to the prisoner bus. Except no one knew where it was. They loaded us in a van at 10:28, and at 10:57 we had circled back to our original location. My shoulders were hurting, hands going numb, and, of course, I had to pee.

I didn't have a chance to ask his permission
to post his photo. In real life he has a face.

My comrades seemed like good guys. Former pacifists, conscientious objectors to facets of our culture, but I got the feeling that over the years, they’ve seen their protests ignored, brushed aside, and now arrested. The guy next to me had committed the same crime I had: walking. He’d gotten off BART, and was trying to figure out how to get to his house when the same deputy chief arrested him.

I’d spent the night, the day, the next night, defending the police, reminding people that they are not all the racist, violent, aggressive caricatures of pop lore. The assholes, basically. Sure, there are some among them who are inherent bullies, who were going to be on one side of a police altercation if not the other, bad seeds, just as there were bad seeds among the protesters. But all it takes is one…

Eventually they gave up on the bus and drove us to a processing station across Oakland. Took my photo against the van, and I signed my form on the hood of a cruiser. I am due to appear in court on December 26. Merry Christmas, America.

Thoughts are overflowing my brain, but the whole thing is buzzing like a fluorescent lightbulb, so I’m going to bed. I hope that’s still legal.

Oakland riots after Ferguson decision

There are helicopters in the sky of Oakland tonight. I have a Thanksgiving blog typed up, ready to go. But there are helicopters above me, still.

The rumble of three overhead, hours ago, provoked a single word: “Ferguson.” A quick check showed that Officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted in the killing of Michael Brown. Photos coming out showed a dense protest of bodies blocking a freeway on-ramp. “That’s...right here,” said my friend, “around the corner.”

The protest had closed off both directions of Interstate 580 when I got there. Signs, chants, and a community’s pain were on display. They wanted to express outrage at police impunity and race relations in our country.

“Justice for Michael Brown!” they chanted. “Arrest Darren Wilson!” they shouted. “No justice, no peace, no racist police!” They wrote: “Black lives matter.”

The wall of cops stood calm, passive, taunted by males of just that age, in all black, on skateboards, behind bandanas, with middle fingers raised. I stood close to those officers, saw the various hues of their skins and the uniform resolve in their eyes, human, but dedicated to their profession. Someone piled garbage in the street, and soon it was on fire. I asked an angry young lady if she ever feels like we’re shouting at the wrong people. She looked at me blankly, walked away.

Over the next couple hours, the police steadily herded the crowd away from the interstate, and the crowd dwindled until the last lingering cops ate hot dogs as I reclaimed my bicycle. Home was close...but these are important times, an important night, so I went downtown. Just to see.

They’d already broken a few shop windows when I got there. The mood was different now. In quiet moments before the storm, on side streets and empty corners, I thanked the officers for their patience, and reminded them that only a small percentage of us were violent, that the rest wanted to voice our anger at affairs in our shared nation. In their eyes I saw the answer “We don’t like it either. But we can’t say that right now.”

I wonder how things would go, if they could? What if the front row held the protective gear, and those behind held signs saying “We think black lives matter too.”? What if the cops just didn’t show up?

Because you know how this goes. The night gets later, the ratio of rationale to rage skews. The fires get bigger. The chanting more aggressive, degenerating into “Fuck the police!” This crowd had no rational path left, just an inevitable one.

Bottles flew regularly now, broken glass on uniforms. Most of the faces around me showed concern, disapproval, the awareness that this was counterproductive, not the reason we were there, not achieving our goal, not articulating our stance. Damaging it. This wasn’t protest, it was hooliganism.

I managed to upload a small video on vagabondurges.com

Shifts in the police line had been provoking short stampedes all night, but no one tolerates attack indefinitely. I could feel it coming. I was surprised it took so long. The cops I had spoken with were now wearing gas masks. Tense minutes before the panic began in earnest, and in its wake came the bangs of rubber bullets, the hiss of tear gas cannisters, and the explosions of flash grenades.

All was chaos, all was noise, all was fear and attack. A protest against violence, against police brutality, had reached a point where the police were responding with brutal violence. It all made me so sad. Such a waste. Such shame. On all of us.

They pushed us back a half block at a time. The announcement was background noise, something about penal code such-and-such and how if we did not leave immediately we would be forcibly removed, with potential for significant injury, and arrested. They would reach a bonfire, and pause while the fire department extinguished it.

Shop windows shattered, looters ran out with armfuls of booze. Cell phone cases crunched across the sidewalk, the owner helpless and angry, a colleague crying “Why are you doing this? You’re hurting Oakland!” to a woman who was either drunk or just not playing with a full deck of cards.

Then the shields would come at us again, batons held ready, more broken glass. More rubber bullets and stun grenades. The crowd was reducing down to the most militant, most violent. When a rubber bullet rebounded off the wall next to me and off my leg, that was enough. Have you seen the pictures from Ferguson of what it does to a human body to be hit by one of these? It seems to basically liquefy the skin, leaving a hole in your most basic of armors, through which all your raw insides, damaged nerves and angry inner core can leak out.

Two shells sit next to me now, as I type. I tucked them in my pocket, looped around the police line, and rode home. Traveling the streets of Oakland tonight has a soundtrack of crackles as broken glass pops beneath your tires. Police cruisers, personnel vans, and the occasional armored bus account for 90% of traffic, and those helicopters are still patrolling overhead. Entire blocks smell of smoke, some of it burns.

How does this happen? A legitimate expression of a reasonable anger smashes up against the wall of our systemic indifference, and in the futility of that deflection, the adolescent idiocy of the hooligan is the only side that has an answer. So instead of a united expression of dissatisfaction, today we will have photos of vandalism, violence, and anarchy. The chance to say something, wasted.

Is this inevitable? I remember the Occupy Wall Street movement. That, to me, was this country’s best chance to hear itself, to regain its soul, to make changes, peacefully. That didn’t happen. The authorities doubled down, the 1% got even richer, and nothing was done to address the bleeding of this nation.

I was overseas when Oakland PD attacked the Occupy camp here, with the same tools but more brutality than tonight, and it is still a stain of disgrace on the city. Tonight? The police came out looking better than the protesters. Maybe Occupy was our big chance, our peaceful protest. Seeing how that went nowhere, what else is there to do but smash?

Leave it to the Dutch to save the future. Maybe yours, maybe mine?

She wakes to a beautiful, clear November morning in 1976. She gets up, dresses, and has breakfast with a few nice elderly people. She has a couple errands, so takes her purse and walks the two blocks to the grocery store.

A nice young man is trimming the hedge out front, and greets her with a friendly wave. She stops and has a nice chat with him. She’s never met him before, so introduces herself, flirts a little, and they discuss the upcoming election. He’s going to vote the same way she is, and this makes her feel confident about the future.

At the store, it’s quite a funny day. There must be a costume party somewhere, because two people are dressed like it’s the 1950s, and three more in bizarre outfits like she’s never seen before. One of the staff laughs with her about it. What a nice young woman.

She walks home with her purchases and meets a nice young man who is doing some gardening out front…

* * *

She wakes to a beautiful, clear November morning in 1976. She gets up, dresses, but when she leaves her room she finds a long hallway that smells like a swimming pool storage shed, with something worse underneath. Old people in wheelchairs are staring at her. A stranger in a white shirt is playing a mean joke, insisting it’s 2014. Why would someone do that?

She wants to run a few errands, but the woman won’t let her. She is being treated like a child. Imprisoned! But her anger avails her nothing, and this woman forces her back to her room. They patronize her so! They try to make her watch TV, but the shows are all wrong. They keep telling her she’s wrong. What’s going on?

* * *

When I worked in a pharmacy in high school, I would sometimes make deliveries to three local nursing homes, which were a sad opposite Goldilocks story: three different levels of awful. And visiting my grandmother in hers, a neighbor would routinely come in and begin undressing, which, suffice to say, was not welcomed by my very prim and proper British granny.

“If I ever get like that, just put me out of my misery” seems to be something many people say, in these environments. I wonder how many of the inmates once said that... Is there a better way?

Of course there is. I may be having a rough day, but I wouldn’t blog you into this corner and leave you stranded. To the Netherlands! (Of course it’s the Netherlands. God bless those people.)

Hogeway is a small “village” on the outskirts of Amsterdam where 152 people with Alzheimer’s or dementia live in small group homes meticulously decorated in accordance with the time period when their memory got stuck. It is staffed with caregivers who appear to the residents as normal gardeners, shopkeepers, post office employees etc. They live their lives in social contact, living what is true, to them. In the retirement homes I’ve seen, residents spend a lot of time being told what they’re not, that they’re wrong, that they’re sick, dying, crazy.

With a recent This American Life episode ("Magic Words" Act 2) in mind, which discussed the newer approach to dementia care in which one joins them in their world, instead of fighting against it, I can only hope that this type of village catches on before I reach that age.

Gifts in Granada

That last post about Tarifa came from an old journal, a paragraph not relevant enough to include in my book, but I enjoyed giving it a little life somewhere else. Another such moment popped up a day and a page later, in Granada. After a long morning walk among the flamenco byways and impressive graffiti of the Andalusian city, I had found a small neighborhood park to rest for a moment.

Losing all my own pictures and having
to use other people's is driving me crazy

Granada was messing with me, one moment of still sunlight would make me wish I’d worn shorts, then the next a winter wind gave meaning to my jeans-ing. I was temporarily in the warmer former, in that place where as much grass grew in the paths as between them, when a child ran up to me.

Yellow sweater, yellow stockings, and a green shirt...with yellow triangles on it. All eclipsed by hair so blond, Rapunzel read about it as a child. Given her gouda complexion, I was expecting Swedish when she opened her mouth to address me, but instead I heard Spanish.

“Hello!”

“Hello, how are you?” The words were the same as high school oral presentations, but the premise had never been: You’re talking to a strange ethereal five year-old in a park in Granada. Introduce yourself and carry on a polite conversation.

“I’m well. Do you speak English?”

“Yes I do.” To prove it, I switched to my mother tongue to say “And do you speak English too?”

An intent pause as she examined my face. A giggle. A solid look at my feet before continuing, in Spanish. “Why are you barefoot?”

Grumble. I liked my angle of this one better.

I sited the beautiful weather, and told her I’d walked a lot that day already. She considered this, then repeated her question, verbatim, and added “My grandpa doesn’t let me take my shoes off.”

Oops. I’d been in this situation before, the accidental bad example, during my hippie days at university when my ten-toed sasquatch presence implicitly countermanded the edicts of new-parent friends. Time for damage control.

“Your grandfather is right. There are a lot of stones here, you might hurt yourself on them...” I’m sorry grandfather, I’m trying.

A moment more careful examination, then she ran off, returning with a double handful of stones. She showed them to me, then dribble-dropped them at our feet and cheerfully informed me: “Rain!” A solid giggle. Warmer than the sunlight.

But it is a good thing I'm not the only one
who noticed Granada's beautiful street art.

“Wait for me!” And she ran off to my right, disappearing behind a bush. I stood blinking, dazzled by the sun and the unexpected contact with an unfamiliar age group, then she was back, appearing from my left with a handful of leaves and twigs. She sang me an unintelligible tune that ended with a shout of “Christmas!” and the plants flung in the air. More giggles. She repeated the loop-song-toss cycle, first with grass, then with rocks. The last round, the ditty may have been about someone’s culo de caca, not sure what the deal was with that one, though it still ended with “Christmas!”

I was about to ask her about it, but she ran back to play with the other children, and left with her grandfather a little while later. I resumed my journey, so did she, so did the entire city, but it’s nice to remember a golden moment of a giggling child on a sunny day at the end of winter.

Alone together in Tarifa

If Spain were a big, worrisomely lumpy breast, then Tarifa would be the downward-sagging nipple, poking across the Strait of Gibraltar at my goal for the day: Morocco. But Tarifa was also the home of the wind, and the first two ferries were already cancelled when I arrived at the harbor in the whiskey-colored lamplight before dawn.

Hours of unrelenting wind cancelled ferry after ferry, until my last chance was the 5:00, four hours away. Tired of hard plastic chairs and neon lights, I wandered down to the beach below rotting cliffs, where the stone ribs of the Mediterranean stuck up on shore in a ragged shirt of dying drying seaweed.

Somehow over the years I lost my photos of this part of that
trip, so these are from elsewhere, in this case, and Kayakoy,
an abandoned village in Turkey.

Down among the fallen rock and discarded shoes stood a line of forgotten fortifications, broken walls with nothing much to do, but makeshift doors and the barking of barely contained dogs testified that somebody was doing something here.

The King of the Shattered was a circular bastion, gun slot barricaded with broken beer bottles and spent cigarettes. It seemed almost whole, though the roof was gone. It’s always the roofs that are the most mortal. Evicted from the beach by a rising tide, I turned to see the door of the bastion now open, framing a man in olive (canvas) pants and a camo jacket with the East German flag on the left shoulder.

We nodded our greetings in passing, but then he sent some Spanish mumbling and crumbling my way. Most of it caught in the wind and landed somewhere in Cyprus, but he added a machine-gun gesture. A wind-scoured moment passed before I realized he was telling me the history of the building. Why not, I got no place else to be. Pleased by my interest, he became an eager tour guide, albeit uninformed and unintelligible.

Windy afternoon in Iceland

His steel hair didn’t speak comb, and he had the watery eyes of someone who had spent long hours in conversation with alcohol, but their sadness was harmless. I looked down at my own olive (canvas) jacket, felt the wind in my overgrown hair, and wondered how the eyes of a traveler who’d spent too many weeks alone might look to him.

I asked to take a look inside and he gestured me forward with a shy smile of a few broken teeth, and the sweep of a quaking hand. In a mess of more broken bricks and crumbled mortar I found his treasure: five underweight chickens of missing feathers and hideous feet.

When I took out my camera, my host disappeared in a hunt-and-peck of words about someone finding out he was there. I wondered who?  I put the camera away and he reappeared, now with a few small eggs decorated with feather fluff and chicken shit, which he carefully slid into a plastic bag. Was he going to give them to me?

Same abandoned village, Kayaköy, Turkey

We hung there for a still moment, two men and five chickens, a bag of eggs awkward between us, while the wind raged just outside.  The thought that he was my future was too heavy, too possible, and I drifted out the door. We dispatched a few last words at each other, with customary incomprehension, and parted as friends.

As I pushed through air that didn’t want me there, wet sand scraping inside my socks, on my way to a barren room for one, my brain deciphered his last words:

“Perhaps you will come back, and next time take my picture.”

This man, alone in this place, as I was lonely on my road, had wanted me to take his photo. Something in our contact had reached him. Maybe he wanted someone else to see him. To recognize him, and hold a camera up to prove it. I knew how that felt.

I considered staying another day to see if the wind would relent. Perhaps go back down to that broken beach and look for him. Maybe take his picture. But that moment was gone, so I caught a bus to Granada, early the next whiskey-colored morning.

(If you are in the San Francisco area, I'll be reading this piece, or something like it, tonight at Book Passage, around 7:00 PM)

Where to find, where to miss, and how to kill the divine

My view that morning

The coarse wool of my djellaba was scratchier than the sand blowing against my bare legs. Maybe the other way around. One does not customarily wear shorts in the desert, but I welcomed the contact, the tactile connection to this landscape where the life stayed hidden and the death stood obvious. The sun was still under, but the wind was up, slowly burying me in Sahara. The steady movement, as I stayed immobile, reminded me of Pacific beaches, where outgoing waves slowly sift you into the sand, a memory from this place’s opposite twin, the sensation’s antipodal kin.

Everyone else still slept while I climbed the tallest dune around our sheltering valley to watch the Saharan sunrise. Seated on the ridge, as the last of the stars dissolved in the growing blue and the curves of this sere place consented to my eyes, I felt an unexpected stirring.

Of course churches can be beautiful.
Reminiscent of the divine even.

I’ve long known myself as a disciple of the ocean and devotee of the redwood forests where my soul was born and my body grew up, places where I felt the presence of the divine far more than I ever had in any manmade coffin of stone or wood, but now, here, on the other side of our galactic rock, I had found another holy place, built of dry textured grains, saturated in burning and freezing, the dust of bones from the places where humans began, but had abused into infertility. And it was undeniably holy.

On a sand dune in Morocco, as in a surf swell in Monterey or a sylvan glade in Mendocino, it was clear to me, illuminated by more than the morning sun, that religion is an improper response to the divine.

Beautiful churches, reminiscent of the divine

The divine is fundamentally unknowable, and religion claims to write it down. The divine is essentially personal, and religion wants all to abide by a standard doctrine. The divine is eternally changing, and religion tries to spike it to a stationary cross. In the end, that's what religion does to the divine: it crucifies it. Impaled on nails of dogma, bound to a fixed position, delineated in an X marks the spot. But the divine does not work that way. The divine is cosmic wind, ocean currents, spring growth and autumn shedding, and now, I added, the migration of Saharan dunes.

I looked down from my moment’s seat atop a slow-sliding deity at the camp below, where my fellow short-lived humans gathered, and thought That is a church. A mosque, a synagogue, a temple, a cathedral, a tent: these are where we upright monkeys find mutual support, shelter, and community. These things are important. Crucial. Beautiful. Even holy, in their human way. They are to be respected, enjoyed, and cherished.

Beautiful churches

We gather together in these places, seeking to know the divine, but over time we grow fatigued of looking at mystery, which never seems to change, never speaks, never seems to notice us, and eventually our vision shortens, and we find ourselves mistaking the setting for the goal.

When we have forgotten the point so completely as to think that our rituals and forms ARE the divine? When we take that confusion as a justification for violence, spiritual or physical, against other seekers (and we are all seekers, even and perhaps especially the Atheists and Agnostics) that is when we have taken a misconception and made it truly blasphemous.

It is not blasphemy to disagree, it’s when we inflict that disagreement on others.

Gaza

This all seemed very clear, in the quiet howling wind of a Saharan morning, and it was easy to think I was the only one listening. But I was not. Talking heads encourage me to believe that Islam and Christianity are at war, but they are not. Some Muslims and some Christians are, minorities both, but those are the squabbles of the sleeping, the martyring of the misled. Religions are just windows, and fanatics can only break them.

We're all just standing in the same tent, trying to understand the sensual slopes outside, the benevolent menace and looming placidity of an incomprehensible power outside. Some might push and shove, thinking they have the best views, telling others what to see, but in the end, we need to leave the confines of the tent and walk the slopes for ourselves.

It's all good

He also cut $1.6 billion from schools. NJ is now
one of only three states where more people are
falling into poverty than rising out of it.

I got a little down about this election. It struck me as depressing that people voted for the party of economic exploitation, the billionaire 1% who feed on the blood of the workers and piss in the pool of nature’s sanctuary. The party of intolerance, aggression and divisiveness.

Sure, I see how people could like the stated values of those oiliest of politicians, but it seems clear to me that their rhetoric is as heartfelt as a vampire’s claim of vegetarianism. “We believe in freedom!”, except for anyone we don’t like; and “we believe in liberty!”, except for gays; we believe in low taxes...on those with all the money, and we believe in small government, except for the parts of it that pay our friends, or that we use to watch everything you do…

That sort of thing. They feel like the party of luxury yachts with Cayman Island flags and armed guards to keep the drowning refugees of wars they started from spoiling their caviar cocktail hour.

But then again, who do I vote for? I vote for a party whose spoken rhetoric is tepid at best, whose platform boils down to The Lesser of Two Evils, and I believe their promises only slightly more than I do those of the yachtsmen. Slightly.

All this bullhockey politicking and deception, distraction and destruction, it makes you want to quit, walk away and get your kicks in before the whole shithouse goes up in flames, as the iconic and ultimately useless Jim Morrison intuited. So I’m going to go with that.

But don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not giving up. In fact, this is actually the way forward.

I will still care about these things, I will still vote, I will still voice my human ethical opinions, but politics? They are not the answer. They never have been.

Because humanity’s problems are not political.

Humanity’s problems are philosophical (and/or spiritual, if you’re into that sort of thing). They are made of evolution and love, not dollars and contracts. They are compassion and personal growth, not ballots and slogans.

Politics holds such seductive promise. For the ethical, it seems a way to pull positive change into the world, and for the im/amoral, it is a mechanism to preserve the status quo of privilege and legitimize their greed. Sure, it is capable of both these things, but only on a very secondary level. It’s in the minds, hearts, souls (or lack thereof) that these things really happen.

We call them our “leaders”, but how often do they actually lead? Very rarely. More often, they are dragged like obstinate children behind the forward progress of our species. Deep down, humans are good, humans love, humans want each other to be happy. It takes suffering, manipulation, and corruption to pull us away from our better nature, and politics is a player on the (small) squad that keeps us from it.

So, if our “leaders” are dragged behind our evolution, it seems to me that the best response is to keep on evolving. So I’m not really going to stress about the Senate, even as it moves into yet another period of insidious destruction through obstruction, and the pernicious betrayal of humanity’s promise (pretty much the way it was already doing). Instead, I’m going to devote my attention, my focus, my soul, to the positive progress of our species, one me at a time.

There are amazing people doing amazing things. And amazing people doing mundane things. And mundane people doing amazing things. But the mundane people doing mundane things? I’m not going to watch them on CSPAN any more. (Okay, I never did, but you get the point.)

It’s the tragic irony of modern humanity, that most of those who want to rule, are precisely those who should be given no authority whatsoever. If we didn’t give our leaders this power, if we sat in our beer halls and laughed at little Hitler’s rantings instead of letting each other think he mattered, things would be a whole lot better.

So/but yes, all in all, humans are sheep. We know this. We follow the flock and do as we tell ourselves to do. But I’d rather hang out with sheep than be mauled by sharks.

(I apologize sharks, that was an unfair demonization of you beautiful creatures, but, y’know, I needed you as a symbol. I would love to swim with you sometime, though please, keep the mauling to a minimum. And yes, wolves would have fit the metaphor more aptly, but I just couldn’t bring myself to slander those incredible animals.)