Trust

You stand outside on a beautiful sunny day and listen to the birds and feel the wind and sun on your face and it seems as if there could be nothing wrong in the world. In fact, if it were not for the people who insist on controlling other peoples existance, this view of the bright and sunny day would be unmarred. But we cannot escape those who would seek to bend us to their wills. We are told it is for our own good, or the greater good, or some such nonsense. We are expected to “respect” those superior beings who somehow have been magically bestowed with the power and intelligence to make our decisions for us as if we were mere mindless children.

YOU ARE A MIND CONTROL SUBJECT

But respect cannot be gained thru fear and intimidation. Respect is gained thru trust. This is not a hard concept for us common peons to understand, yet for some reason, those high and holy important people in power find it incomprehensible. This is not logical by any stretch of the imagination.

Unless it is NOT really respect they are after, but WAR.

A governing body at war with the people, like a mother at war with her children because she forgot how to love them. And not just her own children, but ALL children as well. “Travelers are more afraid of US government officials than the threat of terrorism or crime,” says Geoff Freeman, executive director of the Discover America Partnership. This is so understandable. I would say to those travelers, just imagine having to live under that threat ALL the time. Because we do. We are prisoners in our own country, held under the thumb of those who can not be trusted.

FORMER GRANTSVILLE CHIEF GORDON INDICTED – Facing Nine Counts (05/08/2007)

It’s a sickness and it has spread across the globe. A lot like the malady of the globally disappearing bees, only this is globally disappearing sanity. From the top down it’s not looking good.

It works like a slowly moving black cloud of invisible sludge, blocking out the light of reason and honor and common sense, and creating a darkness that filters down even into the cracks and crevices of the psyche of the common man.

They say our constitution is in ruins, our democracy a travesty, but I say the very essence of our “civilized” world is at risk. Our president and vice president are out of control, like mad children with toy soldiers, authoritarians supreme, setting the examples, somehow making it OK to kill and torture, somehow making it OK to do anything at all, because the end justifies the means, because they say so. And it doesn’t have to make any sense at all, only to them. They have turned wrong into right, simply by saying it is. And the rest of the government follows along nodding and saying, oh yes, we can do anything necessary and it’s OK. And so the spiral of illness spins downward into the center of our world. The burocracys we live with every day of our lives, from the schools, to the DMV, from your insurance company to paying your electric bill, they are all infected with the sickness. Employees move around the room with glazed eyes, pushing buttons on their computers. The computer knows all, the employee knows nothing. Humans become like robots. And nothing makes any sense. What used to be simple is now an obstacle course which takes twice the time and twice the money for half the good. But no one can fix the problems. Because no one is ultimately in charge.

And then there is the legal system, from police to lawyer. The hell spawn child of big government. Another arm of the sick monster. And because father government is crazed and lost in authoritarianism and power lust, the hungry child runs about like a screaming idiot, devouring anything that gets in it’s way. Just like a child screaming in a fit of temper until it gets it’s way, the people who have been entrusted to “oversee” us have bastardized their positions of authority using the power of intimidation and the weight of a badge and gun and uniform until we give them free reign rather than face their possible wrath or their particular form of revenge.

POLICE FUNDRAISING UNDER FIRE

And so it goes, until we get smart and stand up and DO something about it…

The Hippies Were Right!

Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol’ tie-dyers some respect

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

Here’s a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they’ve done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who’ve been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the “authentic” hippie ethos — the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation — has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation’s reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it’s taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation’s incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what’s going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the ’60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we’d be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you’re really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what’s called the reactionary simpleton’s view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the ’60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It’s all right there: Treehugger.com is the new ’60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And oh yes, speaking of good ol’ MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire “excessive,” “naive” drug culture of yore in favor of much more “sane” and “careful” scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now — though that might be due to all the mushrooms he’s been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you’re not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don’t give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?