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.)