Why We Must Accept the "Arab Spring"

The Arab Spring has become quite the topic of contention.  But more than that, the Arab Spring Revolution, and the way we have been treating it in our culture, paints the long standing picture of mistrust between the two fundamental ways of the past: Christianity and Islam.  Christianity, an extension of Judaism, states that only through belief in Christ the Lord can one attain the heights of heaven, the forgiveness of God, and eternal bliss of the heavenly afterlife.  You must follow His example of life that is recorded in the Gospels, which are a true statement of Jesus' existence in this world - where he was born of a virgin, crucified, buried and rose three days later.   In Islam, one must submit oneself completely to will of the One God, and believe that Mohammed the Prophet was spoken to by an Angel and given the Quran to lead his people to unity and greatness.  The book is used as an addendum to the Torah and New Testament scriptures that make up the first two books - with the belief that Moses and Jesus were Prophets, as Mohammed.  Yet, only through the teachings of the Quran, one can find the Emanation of the One God in the afterlife - which is why it is considered the truest word of God.  This does to Jesus what Christianity does to King David of Judaism, and the Christians didn't like it.  

Fast forward 1300 years, pass up a few crusades and Jihads (which were both created through the religious ideal of Holy War), a restructuring of governing principalities after WWI, the Iranian issue after WWII, and the Zionist victory, we have our Revolution.  Is it any wonder why the Arab nations wish to control their own nations for once?  British and US interests have been dictating policy over there for quite some time, very similar to the way the British government dictated policy to the Colonies before they revolted.  Now, Arab colonies are rebelling. The only problem is that, for the most part, they are revolting against the NATO selected governments.  This poses a problem, because we still have this underlying fear of Islam, and many of the governments elected have Islam as their principle document of Faith in the writing of their constitution.  Yes, in many ways, this has the possibility of removing many of the rights women have.  But should we not have faith in their system of government to be able to gradually restore or grant those rights?  Let's look at a country who had similar beginnings.  

In 1776, the United States of America was created.  After suffering horrible losses in the French and Indian War/The Seven Years War, the Colonies, now under much heavier British control, demanded a say in parliament for the taxation of their goods and services that were paid to the crown.  Some of these colonies were Puritan - the New England region.  The Puritan government was based solely on the religious orthodoxy and dogmatic principles they embraced.  They were seen as extreme Christians by outsiders, and were persecuted for their religion in England.  They helped create the doctrine in the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.  Many of our founding fathers originated from the New England Puritan Colonies - and quite a few of our Presidents.  We didn't have our "perfect document" right at the start.  When we won the Revolution, and gained our Independence, we did not go right into our current Constitution.  We began with the Articles of Confederation, which did not succeed in the long run.  We found we had to have the proper balance between federal and state governments, while giving everyone a voice through representation.  It took a few years for us to realize our mistake, but in the long run, we made it to our living law.  

I will also note several things we did as a budding nation - slavery not needing to be mentioned for the obvious social flaw.  Women could not own property in many states.  Those that did allow women to own property only granted it through a husband's death - as frontier territories and states allowed, since husbands would often get killed by Indian raiding parties.  But that still didn't get women a vote.  After the Civil War, certain Amendments were made to allow every race a vote - but not every gender.  We didn't give women the right to vote for well over a century through our country's progression.  Even then, we allowed laws to separate which rights applied to which people based on color or gender.  They were eventually overturned, and cultural progression advanced to our present state, where we argue whether or not certain laws should apply to certain sexual orientations.  

We have no right to judge our fellow man for basing a country's principle document on religious belief - we did the same. We have to accept that Islam is not inherently evil, as we hear from FoxNews over and over, because we have the same principle of Holy War within our religious dogma as they do.  The Christian principle may be a bit different, but the overall ideas are the same.  We need to understand that when some crazy guy calls out a Jihad against the United States, not everyone in the Islamic community will follow.  We need to trust that the government will track down and possibly capture/dispose of them before they are able to come into the United States.  While 9/11 was a tragedy of massive proportion, and someone had a definite inside track to be able to pull it off, there is a lot of evidence towards it being a false flag operation.  Regardless, we eventually tracked down and eliminated the person who supposedly plotted the attempt.  We got our revenge/justice.  Now, we need to back off and let the region start governing for itself.  We need to let them go through their own progression of statehood, learn what works and what doesn't, without getting terrified of who's leading them.  We had the Insurgent George Washington, who fought many British soldiers using guerilla warfare tactics before the term existed, as President of our country.  Yet, we have a sector of our American culture that insists Washington is a hero, while proclaiming Arabic leaders terrorists, even though many of them used similar tactics if translated through time and technological progression.  

Why should we accept the Arab Spring full out?  We'd be hypocrites not to. 

"Hate never yet dispelled hate.Only love dispels hate"

"Let he that is without sin, cast the first stone"

"But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away."

“He is not strong and powerful who throweth people down; but he is strong who witholdeth himself from anger”

Mayan Cosmo-what?

Oh yeah, it's 2012, isn't it?  And it's almost over, too.
Which means the date for which all the religious zealots have been waiting is upon us.

RUN FOR THE HILLS!

Ah, the end of the world nuts. What a great picture of humanity. When they're alive, we laugh.  When they've been dead for thousands of years, we take them seriously. Nostradamus, John the Revelator, Jeremiah, Isaiah... all of them taken seriously because something happened to coincide with one of the lines of text. Random Coincidence? Most likely - in fact, I'd be willing wager that, if a study was taken of people who believed in end of the world theories in general, we'd find that 75% or more of our country doesn't buy into it, 15% or less might believe that something like that could be possible, and 10% or less believe wholeheartedly that it's going to happen, and soon.

Honestly, and after much thought about it, coming from a background of belief where Revelations is not literally translated, I say it's a bunch of crap. Revelations as fact was not something that came about in our western culture until around the Protestant Reformation (the first millennium CE at earliest), when educated people began reading the sections of the Bible the priests had left out of the sermons/homilies.  Before this period of time, the Church had maintained a solid 1000 year grip on Western Europe. The Catholics had managed to convince everyone that their religious text was fact (so as to keep control of the people and maintain an order to a chaotic land), and that everything in the text had ACTUALLY happened (and that Jesus and God were both white skinned).  So, when people began to read for themselves this factual text, they began to apply their own theories to their social organism.  These people begat more, and those begat more, who eventually landed on our continent and developed into our nation.  Now, we have people believing religious text as fact, even when science directly contradicts half of the book's credibility (none of the gospels included in the Bible were actual texts from Jesus' time, circa 40-80 CE, 11 years after his death, and most even considered were Greek translations.) - I think I've argued this point before, but onto the end of the worlders.

While they represent a very small sector of our population, they are there, and they are insistent.  But this Mayan Cosmogenesis is something else.  For the first time, religious zealots from completely different regions and belief structures, are arguing for a date made on a calendar by some other religious leaders, who used their insightful astronomical predictions for Creation Myths and seemingly unreachable End Times when their gods will return and destroy the world.  The most amazing part about it is, not knowing the true nature of the date, some of our religions have placed their own belief on that same date.  Jesus will return; The dead will be resurrected for the final judgement; the Messiah will take his people home.  It's the Grand-Daddy of all "End-of-the-World" days.

Having faced 1999, Y2K, 1991 (and the supposed anti-christ then - Saddam Hussein) and several solar eclipses, I have no fear of this Galactic Alignment (when our sun crosses the galactic equator)... but for all that, is it any wonder that I am still a bit curious? What if one of those crazy guys wearing his End-is-Near sign, clutching his bible in hand and shouting to the apathetic masses that they must repent is right?  Wouldn't that just be the biggest joke of them all!

Got my popcorn. Less than two months away - if it happens, it'll literally be the Fight of All Time! God vs. God, God vs. Devil, Devil vs. Dead, Dead vs. Us!  I wouldn't miss it - in fact, I don't think I could miss it if it actually happened.          

Faith Affects Political Ideology - News Flash or Nothing New?

"I never thought of myself as racist," says the older woman who knows she's about to say something that, taken out of context, would sound entirely racially prejudiced.  "And I don't think of myself as a bigot in any sense of the word, but I do have every belief, in my heart of hearts, that Obama is a muslim, and is helping those terrorists that hurt us on 9/11."

Everytime I hear this, I can't help but feel a loss somewhere deep within.  It's crushing.  Truth is, unless some shocking evidence comes out saying so, there never has, and most likely never will be proof that any of those alleged claims are true.  The closest thing they have to go on is his name: Barack Hussein Obama.  Sounds like a terrorist - must be one, right?

I often wonder why it makes me sad to hear such things.  I think maybe it's because an entire ethnic group will have that stereotype association to any of their names or pictures by a very large sector of my home country.  I think maybe it's because a man who could possibly change things for the better and lead our nation into this new century of technological rennaissance is getting resistance in the form angry white people forming a lynch mob to hang the black president, who, by the way, wasn't born here, and believes in a heathen tribal faith, and is a nazi-fascist-socialist-anti-christ.

I'm not saying Obama is perfect.  Look at the numbers.  They reflect a person who put too much on his plate at once, and is now asking for more time to finish the meal.  Whether or not it is his fault, it becomes his legacy in the next term.  But anti-christ?  Nazi?  Where are these people getting these things?  And that's when I look at which people are saying these things.

For the most part, the conservative wing of the Republican party is christian/faith-based/tradition-based people out on the farm, or members of affluent small-town/suburban families belonging to communities whose major form of regular social interaction is church/the corner bar.  It is where the social sectors collide and exchange ideas.  Those who do not show up to church have a common perception in their community of not caring, or not having the right priorities, not being well off enough to attend (i.e. needing to work).  This goes as far back as the Puritans and our continent's first English settlers, when those who did not appear for Sunday services were seen in almost the same light as blasphemers.  This happens across the nation, in every sector - not just the conservative wing of the Republican Party.  But it controls the Republican platform the most - as the major component of the right wing is the religious conservative bloc.

What religion does when it enters politics - which it did during the Bush administration - is begin to take over the conversation with belief and idealism, as opposed to fact and scientific data.  Because fact and scientific data so often counter belief and ideals in real-life situations, they can be at odds.  So, I contest that when someone applies the idealism based in religion to their political ideology, there becomes a stand-off in the conversation.  For instance: Grover Norquist, who takes his political stance on taxes to an idealistic-to-religious type of extreme.

More importantly, this religious line of thinking goes into traditionalism, and often relies on hearsay of accepted opinion as opposed to facts and data.  So, when a traditionally reliable source says something - say a certain Christian radio/TV host has a hunch that maybe Obama has similar qualities to the anti-christ in the Book of Revelations (going back to the late 19th century interpretation that the Prophecy was yet to be fulfilled; as opposed to the interpretation that it already happened in the fall of Rome, or the interpretation that says it was just a metaphor they used to create a proverbial Last Battle), and then gives a quote from the Biblical text - they are more likely to believe it over the fact that Obama was not a solid candidate until after the primary (and even then needed a financial collapse to push him over the top).  There was no sweeping victory.  In that manner, Ronald Reagan could have been the anti-christ.  But don't try to convince one of them of that - they might call you a blasphemer.

Because of this, we have people believing fervently in things that are not true because they apply their traditionalist practices of thought to the political atmosphere, rather than separating them for pragmatic applications.  It does not help that their sources of information are tabloid-esque programs specifically designed to corral them into a particular way of thinking.

This aspect is yet another portrait of American Tragedy passed on through the ages, just one more picture on the wall of our social gallery: The Faithfully Used.

Truth vs. Ideology

I was listening in on a conversation today.  There was an elderly couple, maybe in their late sixties, speaking with a person appearing to be of some sort of Spanish or Hispanic background by skin tone who was most likely upper 50's to early 60's in age.
"Hey, my political buddies!" says the single man as he sits down at the table.  The conversation then went to the traditional "hello's" and "how's the wife" kind of conversation one might hear at church, and then they got into.
"That Mitt, he's got a tough road ahead," said the woman.  "But he really said it right when he was talking about those 47%."  I stopped listening at that, knowing the kind of news source they'd been listening to, and what kind of talking points they were going to spew from their mouths.

A week later, the presidential debate.  What a riot that one was.  The president looked baffled almost the entire time - and rightfully so.  Mitt pulled one of those Romney's, and changed his message drastically to win some votes.  Go figure, politicians saying things to get votes - who'd have thought it could happen?  It made me wonder why our arguments - both left and right - seem to be so far apart and yet, so similar.

My opinion on this: Unwillingness to listen to the other side - people trapped within ideology, unable to see the truth.

Here we have two ideological standpoints - conservative and liberal/republican and democratic.  The one factor joining the two together used to be factual data that proved one or the other right.  However, with the advent of political propaganda machines in the form of cable news, we have lost sight of the truth, and have found ourselves locked within ideology.

For reference on this notion, I look at Global Warming.
Facts: Global Warming/Climate Change has been accepted as consensus with the scientific communities of the planet, and conclusions from this theory have stated that humanity causes a good amount of the pollution causing the change.  By burning fossil fuels at the rate we do, we risk increasing the global temperatures to irreversible states due to the amount of greenhouse gases we emit.

So, what do we do about this?  Well, conservatives still have yet to accept the facts.  They continue to deny humanity's involvement in the 'myth' or 'hoax' of the scientific community, and their benefactors (mostly big oil tycoons like the Koch Brothers) double down on carbon energy by saying catchy phrases like "drill, baby, drill," or come up with new ways to sell energy (i.e. Clean Coal - which to many in the scientific community is an oxymoron).

Liberals say we need a carbon tax - a way to regulate the amount of carbon produced and churned into our atmosphere - so that we can make sure people are going to keep their fossil fuel consumption to a minimum. Then again, there are those within the conservative media as well as liberal that argue this tax would make us pay to breath, as humans emit carbon dioxide through exhalation.  Many argue it is a liberal plot to steal our freedoms - people like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, as well as outspoken opponent Alex Jones.

Overall, however, on the global warming issue, we have yet to reach social consensus - however, we do socially accept the need for better fuel efficiency, solar power, wind power, geo-thermal and bio-fuel.  I think it's funny that more people would accept facets of the solution to the global temperature issue than believe that the global warming issue needs to be addressed, or even exists in the first place.

And this is only one argument where truth goes up against ideology.  God and religion, sex education, creationism vs. evolution and many more social arguments get stuck where they are due to people refusing to believe facts over their own ideological standpoints.  This is one of our biggest tragedies as a species, in my humble opinion, and one that must be fixed before we find it killing ourselves.

If Humanity were a hero in an epic poem, they would be one of those all-powerful gods whose only flaw - the unwillingness to believe something contradictory to the principles of the self - would be its own undoing.

This is where one of the great aspects of human art rests - the contradictory.  Though science and religion could go very well together if married, they will eternally be separated because of the dispute over where everything originated.  Beatrice and Benedick come to mind from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.  And what a fitting analogy: Science, the bitter woman trying to get the last word in on an lover, knowing she's right and makes some good points, and Religion, the pessimistic yet hopeful man still bludgeoning people over the head with the same old tales.

To make the point on the original note - the whole truth vs. ideology: Since ideology is spinning the truth into its own tale, we can no longer see the facts as they are.  Things are happening in front of us all, but we all have a different story on how they happened.

Nixon's Republican Party: Modernizing Racism

As I've said before, I do quite enjoy politics.  I also enjoy political history and science.  They both show human development through the voices and actions of those who lead us.  President Nixon was one of those people - a man with a strong legacy, and notorious reputation.  For someone who shaped his political party's future for the next three generations and possibly more, he gets overshadowed so much by the image of figurehead Ronald Reagan.  Since Nixon abused his power so much, his infamy forced him out of the spotlight.  But his aides, interns, former employees and staff continued on.

I will say this many times: The President is an administration, not a single person.  The president is the group of people who run this country - all the secretaries, chiefs of staff, assistants and advisors are the people running the show.  We can attribute decisions, signings and vetoes to one man; all else is to the collective administration of the president.  

That being said - much of Nixon's legacy comes from his administration.  But there were some very key things that Nixon imprinted on his party, and they bely the racism of the segragationists from the deep south.  The first time we saw the arguments familiar with us today was in the election of 1968.  But some things I will speak on come from Nixon's first presidential camapaign.  

1960: Kennedy v Nixon, Kennedy wins.  It was a close election, and Nixon lost.  It was supposed to be the end of his political career.  There was a thought that Kennedy gerrymandered Illinois for the win.  But also, it showed a split in the democratic party and the south.  Nixon felt that if he had embraced the more conservative segregationist policies of the south, some of the democrats voting for a third candidate, Byrd, might have voted Republican, thus giving him the win.  

Of course, Kennedy got killed before he could sign into law the Civil Rights Act - and there are some that believe Nixon hired/assigned the guys to the job, utilizing old contacts in the Senate and CIA.  Those guys he hired would later become his "plumbers," or, the guys who fixed the "leaks."  

1968: Nixon v. Humphrey - This one was considered a realigning election, as the deep south had been brutally scarred by the riots and civil rights protests that had pockmarked its history throughout the 60's.  The segregationists had their own candidate in George Wallace, but Nixon wanted the Republican party to appeal and possibly steal the south away from the democrats.  Thus, he implemented what is known as the Southern Strategy - described as a way of securing the southern voters by focusing on racial issues.  It worked - not as well as it did later in 1972 - but it worked enough to show the south the Republicans had their back.  And they still use that strategy to this day.  

It has come a long way since then and has evolved into states rights, welfare reform, trickle down economics, and the drug wars.  

Nixon went very far to push to the Republican party to the right, and succeeded as we see today. The party now speaks about immigration reform (Romney's "self-deportation" blunder comes to mind) getting back to family values, medicaid reform, school voucher programs, union busting, voter ID laws, stop-and-frisks, checks for immigration papers... Its all rooted in Jim Crow, and the belief that white people are paying to give black people money to sit on their ass and do nothing.  It's a flawed mindset, and one to which many Republicans will cling - the people who believe the stereotypes presented to them.  Since we now have a news organization - FoxNews - that caters to this line of thinking, it makes it so much easier for everyone to segregate into their demographics and play it safe.  

I'm a white male.  I'm poor - making less than 20K per year.  I was on state benefits early in my life, but haven't been since because of the support system I have with my family and friends.  I understand that not everyone has this kind of support system - not everyone has parents who make more money than they spend in a year.  While I get by on my own somewhat (I have a roommate who is also my landlord), if there is an emergency in my life, I know I can turn to friends or family, and they will help me - mostly because they know I would do the same if I had the opportunity.  There are those out there - millions of them to be sure - who do not have well-off friends and parents they can ask for help.  The government is the only place they can turn.  

So what do the Republicans decide to do?  Focus on calling these people lazy, entitlement dependent, unemployed and unmotivated - or rather, lump them into a stereotype.  Then, they talk about how their policies, favoring the wealthy, will help create jobs.  I think it can officially be said now that "job creators" can fall under the abstractions that originate in the Southern Strategy.  The very wealthy are almost 100% white, and the only demographic that can truly force the population into economic slavery.  

Well done, Republicans.  I don't think it will work out for you - but well done.  You've abstracted the notions of racist policies to the point that people don't even know they're arguing for it.  Rather than wonder why 47% of the population isn't paying taxes and working to reduce that number by creating higher paying jobs - or by paying those people who really make you all that money more - you ignore and dismiss them as dependents on a democratic nanny state. 

Good game, willful ignorance.             

   

Why Mitt Romney Will Lose

I love watching politics. The discourse of human events and the conversation of what our society should become with the technology we've created is one of the most beautiful displays of awareness and understanding, strife and peaceful co-existence. I enjoy hearing someone who believes in a different philosophy of government and human social adaption - it helps me not only know what arguments are out there, but also helps frame my own opinions on matters that are important to me.

Moreover, it provides a way for me to relate to someone on a magnanimous scale - where things totally out of my control become important, and I am a major player in a political game. What's my lame one vote going to do?  ...but then again, add up enough lame one votes, and you get an election.

On to my point.

Mitt Romney's campaign is dependent upon FoxNews and the Republican Party.  In order to be their candidate, he has to be far right, meaning "no new taxes", tax cuts for "job creators", against "Obamacare", for national social security destruction, pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and much more.  Moreover, he has to do so AND win the vote of the majority of people in the United States. It is proven that there are more people in the city than in the rural counties, and more people in the cities vote Democrat. The Republicans, who have traditionally relied on the rural vote as of the 1960's and on, have two methods of winning in the cities:

1. Get people in the city to hate their neighbor (1968 Southern Strategy a'la Nixon) by continually harping on how much of their tax dollars go to people in entitlement programs (fear socialism!) while promoting individual responsibility (yay capitalism!) as the answer our social needs.  It's old, it's been said before.  

2. Eliminate votes through voter ID laws, redistricting and requiring criminal background checks for registering voters.  These are just simple and easy ways Republicans eliminate the votes the way they claim Democrats falsely add to them.

I point this out because these are the same tactics used by Nixon to win in 1968: Hate the hippies, they destroyed our country and Nixon is here to bring it back. There was much more to it, the but Republicans in general focused on wedging the factions apart and focusing only on specific votes for a win, and they've been doing it ever since.

But they're doing another thing with it - this time they're using the traditional Democratic technique of "don't look at me, this guy's worse" - or the "anyone but that guy" method.  The Dems used it in '04, and it failed.  Now, the 'Pubs are using it.  Most of the time, when a political party uses the "anyone but that guy" method of attracting voters, they have a solid enemy, or a guy who stands up better against the opponent on certain issues.  But when the enemy of the enemy is worse than "that guy" - which for Mitt Romney is the case for 80% of America - it becomes a poor campaign.

During a time when we have 8% and higher unemployment, displaying a rich, connected, well-to-do businessman that cut and slashed his way to success as the better choice for president than the guy who came from a single-parent home is a bad move, and a good way to lose yourself an election.

The Dems turned the table on the 'Pubs at their convention by using Bill Clinton's "Arithmetic Speech".  It brought the conversation from the anyone but "that guy" that kept billowing through the Republican halls of thought to the "Which guy has a better plan and more experience" part of the conversation.  It set Obama for the win.

This is now "that guy's" election to lose - and Mitt Romney will not be able to prove he's better than "that guy," no matter how hard he tries.  It's only a matter of time before Fox News starts talking about 2014, or 2016, and their next big stud.    

     

Welcome

For those of you who know me - this post isn't going to be anything new... probably just a clarification of what you already know. For those of you just finding me on your random search, the following will provide you with a bit of information as to my background and personal character.

Hello.

Now that I have that out of the way, let's get down to what this blog is about. I believe that humanity, in all its glory and flawed nature, is the source and the truth of art. Throughout the course of human history, everyday lives of people have played out through expression of intent and emotional awareness.  For this reason, I say humanity IS art in and of itself. The frustrations we all experience, the common joys we have together and apart, unite us in an artful mosaic that plays the symphony of life.

I am the audience; You are the audience; We are the performers.

So, this blog is a small commentary on the art of everyday life, and the big things playing out at home and abroad. Here, I will focus on the major shifts of human history, art, and life - be them political, sociological or artistic in form. I guess I could say the focus is on Humanity.

My background is in English, but I have studied current events, history, philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, theatre, chemistry, biology, music, art history, and mathematics throughout my career as a human being, as have many of you - especially if you are reading this.  My hope is to apply my own humble opinion to the goings on of everyday human life.

Since many of us know the truth about politics - that BOTH major parties are out to take our money and give it to people who have a lot more of it than we do; BOTH major political parties want power, and will say anything to get it; BOTH major parties have propaganda organizations acting on their behalf - I will say that I side with reality, scientific and historic consensus, and common sense.  Since both major political parties are out to give us the proverbial SHAFT - I prefer the one who likes to use lubricant.  

I have read too much philosophy to believe in religion.  I have a faith in something, I call It God, and I think It's in all life - as many religions do.  We should be good to one another - all religions say this.  We should respect our elders and strive to help our neighbor.  "How" becomes the question, and when we can understand that we all come from the same place in our faiths and political ideology, we can begin to have a conversation about something truly amazing.  When we can accept a possibility that we are wrong, the true communication can begin.

Thank you for reading.