The Resurgences

Are we, at this moment, in this year 2024,

on the brink - a hard fall -

to see new witchburnings?

Auto da fe, the New Inquisition?

I wake at night from the dreams

of American gulags, 

Cultural Revolution to purge

- to cleanse in the mind of the purgers -

concentration camps and re-education camps

and lynchings.

Fires of fear and hatred burn red hot

and I wonder - 

will it be my neighbor, my nephew, my cousin -

or some raging mob or secret police

- just who will it be

that drags me from my home

towards this mass grave

where I will die?

Insignificant

Lebensunwerten Lebens - Life Unworthy of Life - was a phrase coined by the German Nazi's, but a very old concept that is having a resurgence in the world today.

Let us call them The Prime Movers, since that's as good a name as any. And let us call ourselves the Looters, the Parasites, the Human Tumors.

Unless you are a Prime Mover, you teeter on the brink of becoming Life Unworthy of Life. Some of us are already there, just look at the growing legions of homeless people every where you go. 

Those of us who are not Prime Movers - over 99% - are fighting each other, mistakenly believing that we are being held back by Black people, or white men, or Christians or Jews, or feminists or gays or immigrants or liberals or conservatives....

We ARE being held back, held down, and losing a battle we don't even know how to fight. 

We Human Tumors are being held back and held down, by a small class of people who believe that community investments - housing, medical care, education - should build their private wealth. Military Industrial Complex builds wealth, decent pay for soldiers and sailors does not, and taking care of our veterans steals what is due to the Prime Movers. Health care and assistance to poor children steals from the pockets of the billionaires. Social Security and Medicare steal from their hefty pockets. 

It's in their interest, the Prime Movers, to keep us weak, divided, deluded and distracted. 

Just to clarify who the Prime Movers are not: they are not the "Global Jewish Conspiracy" or the Liberal Elite or the Reptilians. Those are all stories, boogeymen to divide and delude us and keep us week. 

Class warfare is real, but war was declared - and is being declared - by the Prime Movers, formerly known as the Fat Cats.

 

 2019 to 2022 - A dark time, a plague time. Isolation, watching my country - and the world - overrun with a kind of madness, madness for power and control, greed, and crazy fear-mongering. More than a million dead, many because of all that craziness. Bad governors, misinformation, and absence of science sense or wise stewardship, people died of a disease believing that was impossible, even as they were dying. 

So little feels normal any more. 

"Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home."

I moved to Oregon 12 years ago this week, after living in the Midwest the longest I've lived any where.  I was in the same house there for 12 years.

Today, I'm looking out west over the ocean, thinking about my life in my 70th year. And it would be better not to think but just to observe the beauty out there of waves and birds and clouds in the sky.

Home is an illusion. Belonging is a dream. Love is a fantasy. 

Thinking is a curse.

Premonition - 

Almost fifty year ago, I witnessed how I die.  I could not explain it away as a dream, because I was sitting up, wide awake, in my dormitory room. My last year of college, and something loosened between present and future. 

It was not a vision or hallucination. And I've concluded it was not remembering or remembering a past life. At the time, that seemed more logical than it being in the future, because that past had happened.

Mass killings, mass graves.  

In a mass grave, with the dead and dying, I recognized that my whole life had not been real. This was real, this grave, suffering terror, horror - I can't find a word that really describes how bad it was. The words are too trite to encompass such an experience. 

I was 20, in my senior year of college, on my bed in my room in my dormitory, and yet I was perishing in a mass grave.

I was able to shake off the feeling - the vision, the memory, and left the room, left the building, to walk away from it. But I never forgot.

Nearly all of my life, I've not seen this as a possible death. 

Since 2016, the possibility of mass graves in America is all too easy to foresee. A new holocaust.  

Troubling thoughts pursue me,
I am fearful of the future.
Premonitions, moments of panic,
I imagine what lays ahead.
This last year brought me
growing fears of helplessness,
being trapped in a failing body.
I'm overcoming me with dread.
Sudden ambushes assail me
of possibilities: illness,
crippling diseases or injury
imprisoning me to my bed.

Being Nine

O, to be nine again....

Forever to be nine,
that would be like heaven.
I felt so capable, so hopeful,
and innocence was a sturdy shield.

Those days that are best, now,
are the days when I am surprised
by the blessing of how I felt when 
I was just nine.

To be nine forever -
every day -
that is a dream worth having.