Renewal means reacquaintance
with the energy within you.


Sun 1.29.12


I had a dream this week about an attorney I know, and in it he is in bed with a writer from my hometown. The attorney (in real life,) is scrappy and aggressive, and the writer is pretentious. A French woman like myself, she used to sport a beret among the Anglo literati to signify her exoticism. Across from the bedmates is a counter with a woman behind it. The attorney is pontificating about power. Then he gets on the writer and starts humping her. It is then that I walk through, the bed to my left and the counter to my right, causing him to lose his hard-on.

Earlier in the week, I had thought about my experiences in the court system and concluded that indeed there was a certain power dynamic at play in it, as one is doing battle with an opponent and the stakes are high. As you can see, my dream attempted to correct my conclusion by pointing out that the attorney's power comes over the counter, i.e., he is working for money, and he is getting fucked by a system that encourages him to believe that the more money he makes the more power he attains. He has a false notion of who he is and what he is doing. I am reminded of a quote in Michael Korda's book "Power," "The player should . . . automatically distrust most promotions, titles, symbols of office and raises when they are offered to him." Power cannot be given to you, because then you owe your power to the one who has given it. It must be assumed, taken. Money is not power, on the contrary it engenders weakness, a false sense of security.

In working for money, one is beholden to the system that is responsible for creating these earnings. The way to beat that game is to work at what you would do, regardless if you were paid for it or not. I have had many offers to carry advertisements on my site and have always turned them down, and I now realize that I will publish my own books. There is a cancer in this country that I don't want to expose myself, or my writing to. I control my own destiny.



Middle of Night

Today I wrote about a cancer in our country. This stayed with me and I couldn't fall asleep thinking about it. Greed and its counter valence fear have destroyed our culture.

Where is Jonas Salk today? Who is Dr. Salk? He is the man who invented the Salk vaccine that rid the world of polio. Dr. Salk did not take out a patent on his discovery; he gave it to the world to be distributed as quickly as possible to all corners of the globe.

In our age, the pharmaceutical companies are prepared to let the scourge of AIDS kill untold numbers of Africans because its people cannot come up with the exorbitant prices they demand for their drugs. As can be imagined under such circumstances, pharmaceuticals have little incentive to find a cure if they can keep selling the drugs. Americans who become ill are more and more finding themselves in the same straits as Africans. Doctors and hospitals have opposed plans to alleviate the financial burden on patients for fear of themselves losing money.

Where are the schools that teach Latin or Greek as they had in the past? How many people in this country have knowledge of Plato or Socrates, or piety and spirituality? Kids are not dumber today then back then. They are not taught other languages, or philosophies, no, they are taught about the prevailing values of greed and fear. Here in Manhattan, 1st grade students in elite schools, as reported by the NY Times, are charged $40,000 tuition for a year of their shoddy education. The most corrupt people have become the leaders of the country, and Jesus wouldn't stand a chance with modern "Christians."

Art today is overwhelmed by the decadence in society and is unable to transcend it. All it seems capable of doing is reflecting a trapped dystopian world. In literature, what America considers worthy are books that portray the desperate, empty lives of its citizens, (see Jonathan Franzen.)

We were once a truly great nation with democratic ideals for the rest of the world to emulate. John F. Kennedy offered free scholarships to anyone interested in engineering because he understood that the country needed these skills to develop and grow. Today we have Sallie Mae who turns graduating students into indentured servants who will be paying off their student loans at exorbitant interest rates for the rest of their productive life. Ask not what your country can do for you, he said, but what you can do for your country. In other words, give, give of your heart. Let us work together to create something good.

This country has been at war for 9 years to acquire the resources of 5 or 6 oil producing Arab countries. Its military is involved in torture, kidnapping, disappearances, indefinite detentions, and our president has now signed into law a bill authorizing the military to do likewise with any American they suspect of terrorist activities, the National Defense Authorization Act. Protesters beware. 9/11 happened 10 years ago, yet . . .

In his State of the Union Address, our current president begins and ends his presentation with great praise for the military, that he believes should be emulated. It is no accident that the military is given more power over the people as they become restive. When you're being pepper sprayed by security at Christmastime fighting over a waffle iron priced at $2 by a rapacious and cynical corporation intent on making a profit not matter the consequences involved, and especially since real wages have remained the same since 1978, there is no kidding yourself about achieving the American Dream. People are beginning to understand that the America dream is not going to happen for them.

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Current favorite this past month has been Wake Up II