Light the Fear

I Was There

I was there before the collapse, before the loss of chance, before the shackling of love to the limits of growth.  I grew up in a world of sunshine laced days, racing down the block to the cool metal poll, chalk on the sidewalk and balmy rains every afternoon.  Winning some and losing some, yet knowing the game was fair, the sun my friend.

I was there before the hate and the vitriol and the diatribe tribes propaganda propagated their profit mantra, before the fundamentalists peeled off and ex-communicated science, before we each were so willing to sacrifice the other in our own personal visage of truth, when truth meant something shared, something given and something uncertain accepted.

I was there before the abuse and the sexualization of honor, before anyone snorted meth off a toaster, before reason was overtook by blind faith and fear raped love then married her to raise their incestuous child on a reality show conceived in the test tank of a tube mogul's island party house.  I remember silence and the soft skin of lizards caught dashing between blades of solid green, a mirage fading with interconnectedness and digital everywhere and everything bleeding us into nothing.

I was there before tears stained my cheeks and hope wracked her bones on the shoals of a muse unable to see the tragedy of her song, compelled to sing yet ever hopeful to the future as the blind can never see the light yet bathe in the photons none the same.  We were opportunity and the chance was ours, slipping like a free market failure to find us the right solution in time to make different the trends that reveal unreal feelings failing to fulfill our falling call to destiny.

A Moment For Economics: Funding the Super-Freedom-Few

One of the most enlightened principles of democracy and free societies is the equality of each individual within the whole of the nation, town or community. 

In economics, the "free market" is supposed to represent the pinnacle of this same principle in action for the "natural" organization of resources in supply according to the demand for that resource.

Yet the free market is not free.  Neither is it equal.  Wealth and access to capital are such extreme advantages in the "free" market, that they tilt the power in such ways that eventually, the aggregation of that power in too few hands impacts the experience of freedom and equality for all.

In America now, the privileged few experience a kind of "super-freedom" of privilege and excess, extravagance and luxury, while the majority of us experience a sub-freedom that is mostly free and filled with enough consumerism and the occasional vacation to keep us bought into the whole system. 

We know every day is filled with common risks that could financially devastate us or our family, and in the back of our mind, we know that "the system" won't be there to help us, but  we don't know what to do and we don't like to think about it.

Yet a growing number of people have no freedom or sense of equality at all.  They are so poor that they have not one moment's relief from the anxieties of paying for life, let alone any resources for the toys, gadgets and services our culture tells us mean happiness.  They have no healthcare, no chance to own a home, little to no opportunity for advancement and increasingly a loss of hope.

And who can blame anyone for feeling left behind and betrayed when all around them, our luxury-driven economy turns a blind eye to the mortgage crisis and the 40% rise in the cost of the basics of living like food and transportation.  Meanwhile billions of tax dollars are spent in bailing out Bear Stearns and other failed speculators, subsidizing giant oil companies and debt-funding a reckless foreign policy.

Meanwhile, real American families of good people, dedicated and hard working patriots are being broken right now because of our collective failure, the failure of the free market, the failure of our government.  The "poor" are growing at alarming numbers in America, and the free market doesn't care, the wealthy don't care and the government has sadly failed.

For whatever reason, the free market is not working.  We need something different, something blended with the free market that guarantees the basics of life. 

Surely this is the first and primary "collective interest" we share together, and not our current access to the lottery that is the only opportunity for "a better life" for many middle and lower class Americans in our current highly-concentrated wealth-economy.

As this blog is about becoming a blended being of energy and matter, consciousness and experience, our economy and government needs to be blended to better represent the basic collective interests of its constituents, to equalize the needs of the common masses with the needs of the wealthy.

As we come together in mental and spiritual spaces of worship and creation, let us pause a moment to consider the economics of our times, to peel back the popular veneer of infallibility that surrounds the free market and to admit together we have a problem the free market has failed to solve.

Let us recognize together that we can do better, that a blended economy can still reward individual hard work and feed and shelter and care for everyone.   There is no shame in limiting the freedom of some markets in order to ensure the freedom of all people.

The Limits of Free Speech

When is free speech no longer free? At least when it incites the death or physical harm of other humans, right?  This photo is powerful because it demonstrates the moral divide that separates the world's cultures right now.  We must navigate this gulf in fundamental opinions about basic human rights in order to foster peace, or certainly we will perish. 

 

Free speech and the exchange of ideas and feelings is critical to resolving our differences, but along the way, shouldn't there still be limits to what you can advocate publicly. 

 

What is the point of "free" speech, if you are not free from death for uttering certain things.  Should the _expression of some idea or opinion be enough to warrant your death?  Never, if the word "free" has any of its basic meanings.  The painful reality of free _expression in a multi-cultural world with due process is that you loose the ability to simply kill someone who insults your beliefs or mocks your lifestyle.

 

This is also why these enlightened principles are critical to a democracy. There is no right to kill another human (saving self-defense), and so how does a democracy integrate a culture whose religion grants such divine rights of  killing your critics.   How can we resolve a God-given right to smite an enemy granted by one's religion against the civil obligation to respect the bodily integrity of all others?

 

Certinly the legal defense of your own sacred tenets cannot extend to actually killing anyone for simple speech or publication of critical or satirical comment on those tennets, and so why is it ok to advocate it?  Topics are not off limits if speech is free, but the type of language and the actions urged by such language should be off limits when inciting violent death, shouldn't they?

 

These protestors in London use signs readable by English-speakers, but if you read Arabic, you will see these types of slogans and threats in most if not all Muslim demonstrations.  It will be a true test of Earth's democratic systems for how we deal with our own integrated Muslim communities who endorse and advocate this kind of violence against fellow citizens in public, and an even bigger test of Muslim nation's self-rule whether they encourage or sponsor such hate. 

 

The covenant between the people and of the people that forms the basis for our shared community of citizens includes the right of free _expression, but when one group's _expression threatens the existence or physical safety of another group solely engaged in commentary on them, the freedom of both parties must be balanced in favor of the greater good.

 

Most basic of the rights of being a citizen in a free society is the right to bodily security, and there should be consequences for violent speech that leads to actual violence.  For example, what is the moral responsibility or legal  liability when a Danish foreign service employee is killed in an alley by a mob in response to these protests? 

 

Free speech and the attendant necessary limits to insure public safety make no guarrantee to address one culture's ignorance or negligence towards another culture, but it should protect our basic safety.  If you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded movie theatre, why can they call for the bloody dismemberment of a cartoonist?

 

For this very reason a multi-cultural democacy has a strong interest to foster dialogue among citizens by at least limiting their ability to publicly advocate violent action.  By limiting anyone's ability to bully or threaten another person, the law should foster more constructive dialogue while insuring the basic bodily integrity of all voices in that dialogue. 

 

On both sides of this global conflict, Democratic and Muslim communities must address the open, public-rallying by one set of humans advocating the destruction or death of another set of humans.  What happens in this conflict as more and more on each side give up and simply join the calls for the complete destruction and death of the other side?

 

What happens indeed....