Posts under ‘sustained misery’

I was 12 or 13 years old, back in ’72 or ’73. It was summer. I played outside with my friends and did whatever young boys do, with time on their hands and no supervision. My friend Bob and I were outside goofing around. We ran into Jimmy, a man that lived in the neighborhood. He was tall, thin, had a mustache and long hair, in his late 20′s or early 30′s. He often said hello to me as he walked by. Bob and I saw him and we got to talking. There was a forest preserve across the street from my house, where I often played. As we walked along talking, we entered the woods. I had no reason to be suspicious. I was always in those woods.

I am an alcoholic.

I got sober almost 20 years ago. Before that, I abused alcohol, drugs, sex and money in order to ignore the damage I had done to my life, deluding myself . I crawled through life in a cycle of being drunk or not yet drunk, making more mistakes that would need more drinking to erase. I am nobody special. Absolutely nobody. Everyone on this planet has problems and I have mine. I chose to deal with them by ‘feeling better’, one glass at a time. All day. Each and every day…week…month and year – until I turned to someone for help.

She helped me by asking me two questions.

Is the United States of America is the world’s largest dealer of illegal drugs?  What about the world’s largest gun runner?  For years our government has used the CIA, NSA & other super-secret ‘intelligence’ agencies to cultivate drug harvest and distribution in SE Asia and Afghanistan.  We offer ‘aid’ and ‘trade’ to countries in the forms of weapons and ammunition.  The drugs come home to the US to poison and kill our own population.  The weapons we sell are used either against us directly by people to kill others, who then seek to kill Americans.  Did the founding fathers envision a country that would become the world’s largest debtor and blood merchant?

(Image courtesy of indiesocial.com)

I walked onto the train platform in downtown Chicago today.  A woman had just finished shopping at Macy’s and had several red shopping bags.  She was trying to put everything into one bag.  The wind picked up and blew some of the empty bags down the platform.  I took off running and stopped them from blowing out onto the street. 

Then, she yells to me that: "It’s OK!  They’re empty."  Then she sits down and waits for the train with her two bags full of stuff.  The 5 empty big red bags are just out there on the platform and she makes no effort to pick them up.  I told her that I didn’t want litter for a Christmas present, picked them all up and threw them in the trash (no recycling on CTA platforms…dammit!).

 

Image courtesy of cesr.org

This post begins a series to recognize people that speak about the world in terms of what they observe and what they can prove.  Their voices stand out in the crowd.  In their words, they speak not of fantasy, delusion and rationalization.  Instead, they utilize the gifts of human cognition, awareness to observe what is here in the world around us.  They are not dogmatic, but analytic and take in the world ‘warts & all’ for what it is and what it is not.  They do not separate humankind from nature in any form of grandeur.  In short, they look at things the way they really are and not what we would have them be.

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We are being farmed. We are encouraged to breed in large numbers. Cows on a farm are bred to make beef, leather and fertilizer. We are bred to spend money, lots and lots of money.

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We are in The Matrix, except we are not farmed by machines but by other humans.