9-14-1
The Final Purge
Original Note
In order to get this online in a timely fashion (my ordinary work process is not timely; generally, I don't believe in timeliness) I posted this piece without much of the referenced ("prophetic") material. I'll add it later, as I find the motivation to review the sources. [This note is no longer appropriate, except that I still haven't researched the sources--and maybe I never will, my interest in the subject matter having waned again.]
A. The Preliminaries
I suppose that it's "sensible," or practical, or expedient, in the same manner that it was during WWII or the Gulf War, to pursue the course that is being supported by just about everyone, government, military, and civilian alike. But I have reservations. The pols and the media are whipping the populace into a frenzy of blind patriotism. I guess that we have no choice but to go and get (and kill) Osama bin Laden, but we don't have to be jubilant about it (which we will be, when we are successful, to the point of forgetting why we did it in the first place, thus permitting the problem to continue via escalation. We say we won't do this this time, but we say that every time.) If we do this thing, we should be absolutely cold and calculating about it, to the point of stoicism. I know this is wishful thinking, but what can I do about it, except write? (I know the American people. We're just like all other people the world over, even though we want to think we're not. When we kill or capture bin Laden, we'll be dancing in the streets like Palestinians. And we'll never realize our mutual identity.) After the act, we should be humble and self-effacing in the face of the greater task ahead, armed with an eternal resolution to insist that the world be the way we want it to be. But we won't be. We'll go back to being affluent Americans, disconcerned with the world events we have driven far away. I saw a BBC newscast where an American ex-patriot playwright, Bonnie Greer, made the oft-stated contention that Americans don't know what's going on in the rest of the world. This is a misperception. Many, maybe even most, Americans in fact do understand very well what's going on in the world. The problem is that, generally, we just don't care. [Homer Simpson once said, "Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand." And who is more American than Homer Simpson?] We've lived for so long in an isolated part of the world that we have been afforded this luxury. Well, no more.
Ludi, a young friend of mine, uses Jay Leno's questioning of the people in the street as an example of how ignorant Americans are. This is another form of misperception. These presentations are edited for their comic effect. How many people who have the correct answers to his simple questions does Jay Leno have to ask in order to find the airheads who do not? And most of the questions he asks are about our own country. These people don't even know what's going on in the United States, let alone in the world. This type of citizen exists in every country, not just in America. [How many people in the rural extremes of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia know what goes on in The United States, or even in France or Britain? Or how many ignorant French or British citizens know nothing of the U.S.? The world, despite postmodern times, is still very much a planet of isolated factions.] The rest of us are fairly hip to the world and its evil ways.
As for the proposal that we will perhaps have to put up with surrendering some of our basic "rights" (ala the Bill of Rights) in favor of a government mechanism that is far more intrusive, I am surprised to find that I am not so hostile to that idea per se. It has always bothered me that criminals can get away with their crimes by appealing to their "rights" as citizens. Hard evidence is found in their possession that cannot be used in trials because it was obtained illegally. Very simply put, this is wrong. The laws, I know, are designed to prevent the policing forces from abusing innocent people, and when that abuse occurs, the offending parties should be seriously prosecuted. But when they do get it right and find a criminal, even when they've gathered the evidence illegally, we shouldn't be required to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If a person is in possession of things that he should not be in possession of, he should be prosecutable, despite how the evidence was obtained. If, in the criminal's turn, he wants to charge or sue the arresting officers or forces for illegal activities, fine. Let him do it. But let's not simply negate his criminal offense. If he's guilty, he's guilty, and he should suffer for it. Illegal behavior on the part of law enforcement officers is not reduced by allowing criminals to go free on technicalities. This is a specious, or at best an insignificant argument. If we want officers to behave properly, we will prosecute them for behaving improperly; and we do not do this, for the most part. Law enforcement organizations attempt to stonewall every effort to make them accountable for their sins, and "good-minded" citizens support them in this effort. If officers behave badly, prosecute them, don't make excuses for them. Neither criminals nor law enforcement officers should be excused for their wrong-doing.
It's not what government agents do so much as how they do it. If they approach me respectfully and assert themselves in a proper and civilized manner, being a law-abiding citizen, I am more than happy to cooperate with them. Since I abandoned the drug culture fifteen or so years ago, I have nothing to hide. I'm proud of my life now. [Actually, I've always been proud of it, but now I'm far less paranoid.] I'm proud of who I am and I am happy to reveal the details of my life, if people will only ask. They can come into my home and look around all they want. But they, anyone, had better ask me nicely. I will not be abused. Abuse doesn't lie in what is done, but in the way in which it is done. And while our "rights" are a fine ideal, it is occasionally, maybe even often, necessary to invade personal privacy in order to assure the greater social good. If an invasion of my privacy is a compromise I must make in order to get the bad guys, I don't mind. What I do mind, however, is asshole cops and agents who push people around, threatening and intimidating them, adopting the attitude that they are somehow more important, thinking they are supermen with super-rights who have a mandate to stampede over more ordinary people. And lest you think this attitude and behavior is the exception among law enforcement officers and officials (especially DAs, with whom I have much personal experience), think again. Cops, agents, et al. may vary in their outward manifestation of this attitude, but generally, they maintain it. Cops tend to be more ego-oriented, more aggressive, more full of self-importance. It comes with the territory. It takes a certain kind of individual to become a police officer. Thus, they need to be trained far more thoroughly than they now are in applied psychology and "customer" relations. Since they seem to want to consider their jobs more important than those most of the rest of us hold (and maybe they are), then they should be held to a far higher standard of social relationship than the rest of us are. When you come to my home and invade my privacy, you better be nice about it, or else...I will write bad things about you. (That's the extend of my social influence these days.) Our constitutional rights exist to shield us from this tendency toward abuse by representatives of authority. If they are to be curtailed, they must be replaced by better guarantees that abuse will not occur and a more consistent ability to seek redress of grievances when they do.
B. The Christian Argument
War. Good Gawd, y'all.
What is it good for?
Absolutely Nothing.
--Edwin Starr, "War"
Let's not get caught up in the blind patriotic hysteria. (I know this is falling mostly on deaf ears.) Every time there's one of these unnatural disasters, everyone wants blood. [Rushing out to donate blood is a symbol of our willingness to comply with those who would drain our blood away. (I don't mean this literally, ala the terrorists; I mean it metaphorically, ala the feds.)] Everyone, it seems, but me. Our God (i.e., The Bible) says "Thou shalt not kill." It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill, except when people threaten your life and security." But we assume that it's okay to disobey this commandment in certain cases. And even if this assumption is valid in Old Testament theology (ala "an eye for an eye"), it is certainly negated in that of the New Testament when Jesus says to love thy enemies and turn the other cheek and when he presents us with the example of dying passively for a cause that we know to be right, in the hope and assurance that our example will provide an impetus to move the world culture one step closer toward a more advanced existence. When we undertake to act on an agenda to kill fellow humans, for whatever reason, we demonstrate that we are not true Christians, or at the least, that we are very bad ones. And fundamentalists, it seems (once again), are the worst. [Jerry Falwell blames the gays and lesbians for the terrorist attacks. I had to laugh at that one, it's so sad.]
Most people reject this premise of extreme non-violence as unworkable, even as they admire the courage and effectiveness of people like the great Mahatma Gandhi. [It takes pacifist extremism to counter its violent counterpart; violence is always extremism, no matter who is perpetrating it.] What they are telling themselves in this case is that they could never be as courageous as Ghandi was. Yet, they think they are being courageous when they stand in a line and pass buckets of debris from hand to hand for twenty-four hours at a time, aiding in the search for survivors, or spouting "courageous" slogans and maintaining that if America goes after bin Laden, they will be one of the first to volunteer, or even by simply bearing up under the stress of having to live in a "war-zone," having perhaps lost loved ones, or being inconvenienced by the closing of stores, businesses, stock markets, and air transportation. Grow up. This isn't courage. It's a pathetic attempt to try to see yourselves as something other than the helpless victims that you are. Not that I don't empathize. I cry for you all, several times a day. (I cry for myself, really, out of a sense of my own victimization. I empathize. I find within myself your pain.) But the solution to our common pain is not to create more pain, because when you do, the people in whom you create pain will seek to ease the pain you created by creating more pain in you, and the escalation will intensify. If you really want to solve the problem, you will not seek revenge, but real solutions, which can only come through defensive, not offensive, measures. A stalwart, almost paranoid protection--combined with an equally stalwart, insistent communicative agenda, brings results, eventually. It has been proven, many times over, as in this great American democratic experiment thus far, or as in how China is beginning to succumb to the expectant insistence of the capitalist West, or as in how Russia has had to relent and abandon its own revolution, which it based on a desire to be like America, but instead of setting up the experiment from a reactive rebellious communion, they set about to conquer their segment of the world and dominate it into submission and "unity," which is exactly what the Islamic fanatics are trying to do now, but on a worldwide scale. It's true that the Islamic fanatic problem is far more complicated and widespread than either the Russian or Chinese problems. So, maybe it'll take two hundred instead of one hundred years to bring this force into the modern age. But it can be resisted and eventually deteriorated. Meanwhile, people will die. But people will die anyway. If it were merely a matter of them dying instead of us, okay. (Not really, but as a practical matter.) But it's not. It's a matter of both of us dying, and escalation besides, until... The Final World War. (It will come, in any case. And after it has passed, we'll understand the value of having been trained in patience and insistent forbearance.)
But Americans don't (want to) live like that. [I've been living like this, paranoid and excessively defensive, all my life, so it's no big deal to me. It's nothing more than a verification of my world-view. This is the kind of world we have been living in, obviously most of us blindly, given the "proactive" consensual proposal of the American people to go and get bin Laden and his cadre and supporters, and then to go and get everyone else who has been having the audacity to think that we are nothing more than the benign world leaders that we say we are.] Americans want "practical," not "spiritual" solutions.
I started out by stating that I supposed that it is the "sensible," or practical, or expedient solution to the problem to begin a war on terrorism. Undoubtedly, this is what we will do. Those of us (most of us, apparently) who want to attack the "enemy" want to take the easy way out, because we are used to an easy life. Meanwhile, the fanatics take the harder way. Who will win, in the long run? We would rather take the easy way than the right way. We would rather kill than not. We would rather disobey our basic spiritual precepts than live insecurely, trusting in our "God." Our theologians create great rationalizations to justify this course of action. But there is ultimately no justification for violence. Non-violence is the right way. Our genuine spiritual leaders should be telling us this. (Hey. It's just occurring to me: how come we haven't heard from the Pope? Cat got his tongue?) [Several days after writing this, I see the Pope on television, finally. He sits hunched over in front of a microphone looking as if he's barely conscious, and as he spouts the typical inanities we have been hearing from every politician, he is actually drooling. Now there's a spiritual leader we can all admire.] We believe in non-violence, generally, or we say we do, but we put it on hold when times get tough. Non-violence is a difficult choice in the present, but in the long run, it's far more effective. There is a power available to us that is far more effective than war. But no one wants to be as strong as is required to bring that power under our control. We want to use it in a less efficient, watered-down, stereotyped way, which is how we always want to act, as, for example, when we evoke our ineffectual attempts at "prayer," which we pay lip-service to, but which we never seem to manage to take seriously enough that we will make it work. When we're desperate and don't know what to do, we pray, pretending to the point of belief that "God" can hear us. And in those few occasional cases when coincidence seems to indicate that our prayers have been "answered," we call it a "miracle." If there is a miracle, it is not that a god answers your prayers, but that humans possess a psychology that is capable of creating reality out of belief, via expectation and a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that it works despite our delusions of a "higher power." If there is a higher power, it is the potential inherent in our own collective mind.
Real, effective, prayer is a psychology we provoke, to accomplish the results we would otherwise not achieve. When we are truly desperate, with absolutely no recourse but to pray real prayers, then we will spiritually evolve to the point where we can effect a change through nothing more than the insistent communal will of people desiring peace through peaceful means. Unfortunately it is going to take the passage of the most horrific war in the history of mankind, far more horrific than any we have seen, for this circumstance to evolve.
C. The Scientific Argument
It's a dog-eat-dog world and I'm
wearing Milk Bone Underwear.
--George Wendt, "Cheers"
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We are nothing more than complex, highly sophisticated animals evolved to the point of awareness of what we are doing, but little more, struggling to survive by killing our enemies before they kill us.
D. The Apocalyptic Argument
"There's nothing you could have done. It was God's will."
"I never much agreed with God's will."
--from Man in the Wilderness
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This is all a lot of hype and smoke and paranoia, which the media is playing right into. I wouldn't even be surprised if it later became revealed that the intelligence community knew of the attacks ahead of time, but allowed them to occur in order to get support for their agenda. That's how jaded I've become. In any case, it has certainly been taken advantage of after the fact. Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon, which is rolling downhill toward an inevitable and irreversible catastrophe. We are being herded into a blind patriotism of war and retribution. [One nice side effect, though: it sure is great to watch the news without all those damned commercials. I almost feel like I'm watching the BBC, except for the inanity of the American news people.]
All the people who have thus far been considered conspiracy theorists and end-of-the-world freaks are beginning to look like prophets. The "sane" people of the world will continue to run blindly headlong into the irreversible nature of coming events, continuing to disregard the warnings. Oh, well. It has to happen sometime, so that the change may come. For about twenty years now, I have been half-seriously following the "hints" from "prophecy" sources concerning the "end-time." Every time I've tried to point out to friends this thread of human thought, I have been dismissed as a doomsayer and a weirdo, even when I only want to consider it as a cultural phenomenon. No "sane" person wants to hear this stuff. It's almost as if everyone's in denial. (By their refusal to listen, they give the matter credence.) But now the arguments and interpretations are looking more and more rational. First, there are the usual better-known images, such as "wormwood" and the charismatic leader in the blue turban [yet to be revealed. Saddam? I don't know. He doesn't seem very charismatic to me, but things change. (Imagine Bush in a blue turban.) (A French Canadian newcaster on the CBC pronounces Bush "Boosh." President Mouth.)] Then there are the intermediate, transitional elements, such as natural disasters, "wars and rumors of wars," etc. But finally, there is the analysis of the global powers at work: The Great Bear of the North (Russia), The Army of the East (China), The ten-headed beast (NATO--or is it a federation of extremist Islamic countries yet to be fully formed? The trouble with prophecies is that they must be interpreted.), et al. People don't want to see how the now loosely formed confederation of Islamic fanatics, when attacked, will lead these global forces into thermonuclear war. First, we will strike one stronghold, probably Afghanistan, with moderate success. Then emboldened, we will strike "closer to home," probably in Iraq, since we have a foothold there already. Or maybe Syria. Here we may meet with some surprises, like chemical and/or biological warfare, [add Bible refs] but we may experience further moderate successes, which will only serve to encourage us further, maybe enough to chance a stab at the Palestinians. And then, look out. We will drive militant Islam into a corner. Already, warmongers are talking about using tactical nuclear weapons. And this is from "sane" people, not the typical "crazies." The world is going nuts. A global battlefield is developing, centered on the Mid-East.
The enemy, characterized as the epitome of evil (The Beast), at this future point, when the islamic militants are forced together into an army, must be defeated. There will be no choice. There may already be no choice. As much as I want to urge caution and forbearance, we may already be too far along. Nuclear war, even if only one side has the devices, may be inevitable. And where else will it occur but in "Palestine?" The Valley of Jezreel, or close enough to it to be, for all intents and purposes identifiable as the prophecy come true. Armageddon. And Bush and his warmongers will have begun it all. Make no mistake. This is not going to happen all at once. All of the "smart" people in Washington and elsewhere are saying that it is going to be a protracted war. And the worse it gets, the greater the promise becomes that it will soon end, the more it will lead to further escalation, each stage of which will bring further devastation, until large areas of the world begin to look like those descriptions in The Book of Revelations and Nostradamus. [list refs.]
People are coming together, forming the beginnings of a communion motivated by a desire to rid the world of the threat of violence. We hold candlelight vigils. Britons and Canadians go so far as to sing the "Star Spangled Banner." Many peoples around the world hold religious services during which they feel a sincere (as opposed to a token) empathy with our plight, and thus with our "cause." People who have been traditionally antagonistic toward America cry for us (and for themselves) in their streets and in their churches. This connection that is forming is the fatal flaw. Being so communally motivated worldwide to end the "evil" [it probably is true evil, as traditionally defined] once and for all, the good citizens of earth will act under a common banner to precipitate the confrontation that has so long been avoided. This motive will concretize the dichotomy, which will provoke the final war to resolve the impasse, so that the communion may become a permanent condition. [No less a despot than Saddam himself warns America not to attack, in words which seem almost like a plea, devoid of his usual aggressive, hostile attitude. He, if no one else, seems to see the pending nightmare. And he's in a position to know. Maybe he is, after all, the anti-Christ, waiting reluctantly, as was Jesus himself, to take his destined place in the global theater.] In other words, our desire to be a free and peaceful people will usher in the (Biblical) Millennium. But before this can happen, the planet must be purged of its evil intents. Unfortunately, to dislodge and eradicate the vested interests of the "bad guys" (i.e., they who would overthrow the world in order to establish a "newer" world order, one based upon the supremacy of the male, a throwback world society, where barbarians like apes rule a planet enmeshed in a pseudo-spiritual patriarchal establishment), there must be the greatest era of bloodshed and devastation ever experienced in the history of the human race.
Can we prevent this? Maybe. But not forever.
Can we, as I have previously thought, enable the victory over evil to occur over a much longer period of time so as to "water-down" its murderous effects? Maybe. But not by going after the "terrorists" so directly all at once. Through forbearance and patient "prayer" (which will be required in any case, in order to align our minds, to attune them to the global will, to spark the communal recognition in each of us, that we are one organism spread across the surface of a planet) we could achieve the same result in a more peaceful way. But will we? Probably not. As a species, we don't seem to have the capacity to "metaphorize" the prophecies into a gradual mutative experience. (Most of the most rational among us, the intellectuals and scientists, don't even believe in the prophecies or in prophecy in general. Very few of us believe that an intelligent species can endow certain of its individuals with true foresight, let alone an ability to predict the future--and it's no wonder, considering the number of charlatans we see every day on television.) Even at the "highest" level, we still tend to be more oriented toward action than patient persistence. We don't really want to be spiritual (although we think we do), because we don't know what that means. At best, most of us think it means turning inward and finding the common ground of humanity and/or nature within ourselves, but it means exactly the opposite. It means embarking on an outward journey, allowing a part of our consciousness to literally leave the body, giving up our precious ego-experience in favor of the shared perception of a meta-personality. Most of us haven't the least comprehension of what that means. But we begin to see inklings of it in our communal efforts of gathering together to empathetically feel each other's pain. It's going to take a lot more of this kind of feeling, a lot more pain of the most excruciating kind in order to free us from the prisons of our ego-selves. And the pain is going to be felt directly by a very large number of us (two-thirds of the world population), in the form of war, [list refs] and deprivation of the most extreme kind, and indirectly by the lesser number of us (one-third), via a super-empathy that is so profound that we will feel it as if we are a part of the larger segment of the devastated population. It is the extreme, unprecedented stress of this super-empathy that will mutate our physiologies into a form whereby we may consciously permanently connect into the SuperSoul of which we are all now a profoundly unconscious part. [Or, explaining it in "scientific" terms, the people who survive the devastation will be those who are conducive (via their genetic inheritance) to "psychic connection," thus enabling a foreknowledge or "intuition" of events to be avoided. (Their developing communion is the "Church in the wilderness.")]
But, lest (a few of) you (who are reading this) are horrified by the apparent impending immediacy of these ideas I have presented here, there are two consolations:
1) The worst of these events (according to the Biblical prophecies, that is) cannot occur until sacrifices are restored in the Temple of Solomon. [ref] Watch for this event. It is a definitive signal whose occurrence will require that control of the temple be wrested from the Palestinians. [If this prophecy is not accurate or does not apply to this modern time, then we have every reason to be optimistic re the outcome, that the U.S.-led global coalition can weed-out and defeat without an eternal cost the antediluvian forces of the earth.] Thereafter, we will have either three and a half or seven years of extreme tribulation (depending upon the interpretation of some very vague and confusing time lines--or the period of time may be metaphoric) before the final battle and the resolution of the conflict by the arrival of the Messiah (Jewish interpretation), and/or the second coming of Christ (Christian interpretation), and/or the further evolution and metamorphosis of the human species (my "scientific" interpretation.) Jane Roberts (as Seth) places this date at 2057. [add ref.] So, you see, we have a lot of time. (Maybe.) Unfortunately, we have a lot of pain to feel before then, a lot of war, a lot of distant (for Americans) death [I have no doubt that our leadership, despite the cost to personal freedom, will protect our sub-continent from the brunt of the devastation. We (Americans) are experts at projecting our tribulations onto less "developed" areas far away, as, for example, when we have been able to live affluently at the expense of Third World economies.], and an increasing frequency of catastrophe made to feel all the more immediately terrible by a timely media prone to dwell upon the older news even after the newer stuff happens, in order to fill up their unscheduled program space.
2) What occurs afterwards (if you are not dead) is a period of peace such as the world has never seen, where the "lion lies down with the lamb," where [this is my own conclusion, informed mostly by intuitive induction from the writings of Teilhard de Chardin] we are all so intricately intuitively connected that we could never enable or allow such atrocities as are now occurring to gain even the smallest foothold on our planet, where every thought tending toward violent, terroristic deviance is recognized in the indivdual as it occurs and is attenuated before it can prolifigate, where over-reaction against individuals for their "difference," their deviance of thought which is not crucial to the well-being of others, is tolerated by the same mechanism that would repress crucial thought, where those incorrigibles who persist despite correction will be eliminated, where all physical processes are under the complete control of our connected meta-brain, the earth's evolving mind and soul. Amen.
notes
If Islamic fanatics are wrong, then the IRA is wrong. We, many of us, seem to want to be sympathetic toward the IRA, either being of Irish Catholic descent or being strong-minded American individuals who see ourselves in the gun-toting Irish rebels fighting the English establishment, the Redcoats. Neither group (the IRA or Islamic fanatics) is wrong in theory. Both are absolutely wrong in method.
Friends ask me what purpose the fanatics could have, what they hope to accomplish. They say they can't seem to comprehend the futility of the terrorist cause. What could they gain by killing our citizens and disrupting our economy? The answer is simple, really. It's an age-old motive: Islam is, for the most part, Third World. Even when Muslims are a part of the mainstream world culture, they seem destined to play a secondary role. They, like everyone else, want dominance. It's a motive of evolution. It's programmed into our genes. We instinctually challenge the top dog. They want to see the collapse of the West, so that their system of religious belief may supplant ours as the dominant one, even the only one, on earth. Why is no one in the mainstream media pointing out this agenda? Does no one see it? Are we destined as a society to remain so superficial as to think that terrorists are the simple revengeful American-haters that they are portrayed to be?
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The media interview people looking for lost loved ones, intentionally asking leading questions designed to bring them to tears, so that they may present an agenda of (manipulated) pathos to the viewer.
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I don't fly anywhere any more, because of safety issues unrelated to terrorism. The airline industry has been far too greedy, too concerned with the bottom line to attend to the safety of its passengers. This is now borne out by the lack of security, which allowed this catastrophe. [Logan Airport has been in violation of government mandates for years. So have many other airports and airlines. And those who have complied only do it to the letter of the law, and not in the spirit of safety issues. If it can be done more cheaply, it is done, despite the potential lack of safety. This has been known for a long time (and not only in the airline industry.) Corporations, more out of a sense of greed than of mere need to cut costs to compete, cut back on the quality of employees and (unseen) services.] Now, I have an additional reason not to fly. And I have an additional reason for staying home altogether. People think I'm crazy. Maybe I don't look quite so crazy now.
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