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Greetings All,
If there was ever a reason for the ezine Staying Awake, that reason just might remind us that we humans have a tendency to forget too quickly. And these days, forgetting is more likely replaced with neglecting one advantage for another in mazes of challenges and possibilities.
Putting aside mental pressures many of us feel, here are reminders to take deep breaths a few times each day, and to exercise your arms and legs daily (if you’re like me mostly sitting too long at the desk). Staying attentive to our bodies’ feelings, and releasing anxieties while awake hopefully helps in rousing refreshed after sleep.
My first trainer once told me to choose some exercises, any I happen to like, and do them—just do them, he said. So, I did and have, and here’s to you those same good ideas!
From volumes of fascinating challenges, months ago via YouTube, I was taken by surprise while listening to a mega church’s fundamentalist preacher in USA speak a sermon in 2003 titled Whom do we owe? (The preacher’s words are paraphrased and blended in this introductory essay.) As a nation with national debt, we owe the Federal Reserve System trillions of dollars. The Federal Reserve System owns USA. As the camera spanned the congregation, there were more than a few handsomely beautiful blank Christian faces. ¹
The preacher distinguished the two masters that Christians worship: the Lord their God to whom they are indebted for a kind of mental health after sins have been washed away, and the Federal Reserve to whom many (most, all) USA citizens are indebted via our government's spending (for wars, and our citizenry’s worship of shopping and owning stuff).
The Feds, who create money out of thin air, are seemingly not and cannot be held accountable. There is neither a limit on the amount of money the Feds can create and loan via paper money or electronic transactions, nor a limit on wealth they can accumulate. The Internal Revenue Service is also an instrument in a widely webbed behemoth of financial and psychological enslavements.
Where is freedom in debt? The preacher noted the congregation had no freedom, considering freedom of any sort is ambiguous from the start. Try missing four mortgage payments, or sequential credit card installments, and we’ll soon receive reminders from whom we are indebted.
Consequently, consider freedom in USA a delusion as long as you’ve owed a bank an installment, the payment of which is paid after your labors as a company employee or an entrepreneur in private enterprise, demonstrating you are owned and forcibly enslaved psychologically.
A further reminder that’s old news, lest we forget, the bank system by slight of hand gleans capital not by loans for another yacht, football stadium, or space-born satellite, but by interest payments remitted from the borrower. Billions of our global sisters and brothers have become slaves within an economic conquest by banks pimping indebtedness. Vast webs of amoral financial systems use humans as laborers for profit while simultaneously using nations’ leaders’ debtorships for enslavements.
We are witnessing on the grandest of imbalanced scales, that only an overly populated planet can illustrate, an elegantly designed plan for citizenries’ fear on one side, and on the other, creative accounting practices passed from one bandit to another. The imbalance of financiers’ ploys in extortion and doublespeak—over ruling taxpayers’ natural anxiety and protests—is euphemized by two words: international finance.
Financial conquest regenerates an imaginary abyss, an unnecessary challenge for human’s imagination through generations into millenniums. The same will be said here about religious systems’ embedded despair, particularly global Protestantism. Refer Fantastic Utopia, Staying Awake essay.
Too Much Provincial
I think we are too much provincial when we hang on to old ways of thinking and doing without sensing when to stop. People presuming they cannot be wrong, while unwittingly espousing beliefs that evidentially support religious extremists, can show tendencies of being stiffly relentless during years of forcing cruel beliefs into realities. Over millennia, civilizations’ rulers have been apt for constructing obsolescence into empires and hyperpowers and forcible debt by the will of their God of choice. So, visible and invisible power mongers can presently thrust their divisive, divinely delusive, millennial corporate experiments where the Sun don’t shine.
Older and wiser than my training as a youth in evangelical circles, I’d say apparently the earliest debt and tax collectors were rulers of imaginations out of which they, as masters of slight of hand, invented on their behalf another image of a fierce God, and mixed paranoia within merciless business practices in the name of their imaginary deity. If unethical, malicious money masters reflect human’s sinfully greedy tendencies over thousands of years; if it’s necessary for sheeple to believe a savior in heaven is able to feel forced to rapture them away from others’ swarmy, unrighteous tendencies; if extortionists continue incessantly, then human tendencies reflect the old premise of being created in the likeness of God’s image: an invisible, grotesque and tasteless ruler recorded in the old testament of King James Version 1611. Jesus’s message in the new testament, however, was that of God the Father being loving and lovable while the sainted Paul later splits again the collective psyché by writing neurotic, pious ideas in letters to early churches. Believed today by many USA congregations, Paul’s evangelist calling included training early believers to remember his fondness for them yet his convictions likened the avenging, paranoid and racist God of the old testament.
Thus, many taxpaying hirelings cannot win for loosing; some visible or seclusive ruler, lobbyist, philosopher, scholar, theologian, preacher, merchant, corporation, via advertisers’ and marketers’ systematic stunts are quick to point a finger, daunting citizens into fictitious submission. Although I want to believe citizens of USA are being the best we can be, given contentious wisdoms in bourgeois mythologies, Gods of the three primary Western religions have too long been allowed to mock imaginations already numbed and too much provincial. By design, lavish shame regenerated by artificial indebtedness to corporatocracies purposefully undermines even a vague, narrow notion of peace. ²
Hooligans Still
If we onlookers had actually witnessed early humans, we would possibly call them hooligans who roamed and trained each other by, what we might describe, barbarous ways protecting themselves as best they could from competitors and unbearable weather and quakes. From a profoundly servile human psyché installed over millennia by virile administrators of delusions, our species during the Industrial Revolution began turning up the volume on self appointed destinies for owning Earth and all other life on it. Albeit, many cosmologists’ studies report possibilities of we humans being just another species of geological stalks of walking flesh who too much assume what’s right about anything at any time, anywhere.
My theory is we are hooligans still, especially as the heat of rulers’ governmental and designated fraudulent systems cook citizenries’ pocketbooks. From top to the bottom of the financial pyramid, everyone attempts protection of something; for instance, in USA, at the top of the list of best protected businesses are religion, human trafficking, war, and oil. Hooligans are easily tempted and enslaved by standardization and uniformity in Average Joe Debtors’ tedious systems managing interest due and installments, and standardization and uniformity by families of ruling wealth managing systems that monitor accumulations. Hooligans’ spectrums of systems are presumed protected, projected, and performed from cradles to coffins.
There are rulers who are hooligans and taxpayers who are equally hooligan. But who are the hooligans above the top of the ruling pyramid; who are those guarding invisible rulers’ accountabilities? The seclusive rulers’ negotiations of power after listening and attending to workers’ needs at the bottom of the pyramid is an ever possible improbability.
Evil, the Opposite of Love
Once upon a time when I was a kiddo, my Sunday school teachers always talked about love, and its opposite, evil. Several years ago though, I began thinking and talking as if the opposite of love was fear. While thinking through and writing this ezine, I’m thinking differently still again.
Just by writing this ezine, I began thinking if evil is the destroying of life and property, then, love as its opposite must be the caring for life and property. ³Perhaps, those two ideas were actually the reason for this ezine, because, as I see virtual life, say, on video games during the last twenty years, games’ creators and designers are grabbing millions of dollars, and seemingly proud of it by producing violent devastations of people and other forms of life; and landscapes, vehicles, roads, and so forth.
There are young people thinking twice about their feelings of destruction. Evidently, they’re thinking about caring rather than war with its incentives and massive profits. I’m unsure where teens and young adults are headed, but would their futures tell the story of their training that they will one day refer to as ‘once upon a time’ far less ruinations existed?
Will someone please interrupt the USA presidential candidates’ platform initiatives and fear mongering enough to ask them, and their devoted privatized corporate and sanctimonious supporters, what children around the world might be imagining? I’m thinking pictures and video games depicting war and other carnage speak louder than words in imaginations of children and larval adults for whom this was likely penned:
Signs and symbols control the world,
not phrases and laws.
~ Confucius (b 551 BCE)
Heroes Needed
Still well known for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo’s research looks at the psychology of heroism and asks, “What pushes some people to become perpetrators of evil, while others act heroically on behalf of those in need?”
Many people are heroes in waiting—some know it, and others don’t. The line between good and evil, which privileged people assume is fixed and impermeable with them on one side and bad people on the other, Zimbardo, social psychologist, discovered that line is moveable and permeable: given the circumstances, good people can be seduced across that line into the powers of systems, and with training, some perpetrators recover.
He served as an expert witness during the Abu Ghraib trials; and, from Nazi comic books to the tactics of used car salesmen, Zimbardo explores the psychology of evil. º
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