Tag Archives: life

Crime, Culture, Education, Elections, Politics 2022

THE PAINTING CALLED LIFE

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Listen to the Artist

Politics is more than pointing out the lies of others, Prudence indicates.  So too is how people and societies organize themselves and their governing structures and technology.  Even more, so too is religion and ideologies of various kinds: much, much more than pointing out the lies of others.  There are larger pictures to take in and analyze and critique.  After all, do artists lie?  Are they, then, no longer artists?

Life is art… or at least the creation of an artist – an artist who tries to teach his/her subjects how to expand and beautify the painting in which they reside, on ever better canvas and frame, and in brighter, truer colors.  Life is the basis of the greatest artist’s greatest work.  Eventually life takes us to the edge of the canvas and what we call death results, but death is not the basis or the subject or the purpose of the painting.  Death dealt for selfish, craven reasons before the edge of the canvas is reached, destroys not only a bit of life but the integrity of the painting.  It’s source and perpetrator must be expunged, cleansed from the art that is life, for it/he/she has no place here.

Details of the art of life can be studied and understood a little better, and a little better, and a little better, still.  Important to the beauty of the multi-billion points of life that comprise the fulgent artwork of life on Earth, is freedom to act in concert with the artist’s intent.  Were there no options, no imagination, no whimsy, no beautiful choices, then the painting would be dull in color and harmony, smaller and devoid of love, the one color that is always the hardest to mix or apply, and the most vivid.

Holding the whole creation together is the love of life.  Here and there, created in love but, somehow, twisted to love death, itself, bits of life, humans, develop the love of death and the “art” of dealing death.  They claim to abhor terrible, brutal, violent death, yet do nothing within public policy to put a stop to it.  On the other hand, the same people use public policy to accelerate hidden, “life-saving” death, like abortion and vaccination.  That’s where the art of death exists, first from euphemism and then, only in unseen places, by terrible, brutal violent death.  In either case, the very presence of death-lovers amidst the beautiful artwork of life causes the artist’s paint to bead up, unable to blend or enrich the near-perfect painting alluded to; it leaves blank, colorless blemishes.

Freedom, or the absence of freedom, is like that: devoid of color, particularly vibrant colors of creativity, joy and charity.  Humans are designed for and have evolved to flourish in an environment of freedom – we’re “tuned” to what we consider to be beautiful and harmonious – and there are “rules” for being free.  Without the rules, which are not limitations, in application, but better described as guidance, humans can easily slip into license and corruption, both mental and physical.  Where this tendency has begun to concentrate we can see that the inherent beauty of human evolution has been dulled, and created still more areas where the artist’s paint has beaded up, failing to mix and blend and enrich the entire picture.  We have names for these “rule-breakings.”

The first name describes corruption of the heart; we call it hatred.  It has many manifestations, but all of them must be taught, it turns out.  Every cultural tradition seems to include an identification of the “first hater,” which is the same as saying the “first liar.”  Lying to other humans is an act of hatred: hatred of the inherent beauty of another human.  It declares that the hater who is doing the lying has no respect for the value and integrity of another person… or even of a country full of other persons.  Hatred is very easy to spread around when haters don’t even realize they are hating others, and when they may not even realize they’re telling lies!

So, the simplest form of heart-corruption is lying, but it’s not always a matter of lying to others: humans can be led to lie to themselves.  That’s an environment wherein there is neither much debate nor alternatives based in pure truth.  A small initial lie, like “this drug will make you happier,” can lead an inherently beautiful human to tell him- or her-self that he or she is not worthy of the beauty that others still enjoy.  Nothing good flows from that belief.  Even worse, rather than trying to convince such “lost” people of their inherent beauty, political forces try to make reinforcement of the new self-lie much easier.  It’s called respecting “civil rights” but it is an ugly perversion of the beauty of human life.  It also seems to be contagious, tending to infect younger and younger, beautiful humans.

At some point, societies develop a means of “enforcing” the rules of freedom so that the greater “good:” the maximum number of humans being able to survive, grow, create and have successful families and children, is assured.  Except for those whose freedom is stripped from them for varying degrees of failing to follow the rules of freedom, the enforcement paradigm works fairly well until a fresh lie is introduced: enforcement “hurts” too many people.  The political/police enforcers are quickly led to still another form of hatred-lie: “hurting so many of our fellow humans is not who we are as a people” and that ending a lot of enforcements is the “right” thing to do.

Now the artist’s beautiful painting becomes even more dull and hard to look at by humans who are still mostly beautiful… and hard to understand, as well.

Soon, because political power and re-election trumps everything, confused humans are led to hate those who refer to rules of freedom as being anti-freedom: the worst of all sins.  The defense of “freedom” for those who are already in the business of lying, readily morphs into the defense of licentiousness, at which point every person or institution who defends adherence to the “rules” for freedom, is identified as an enemy of “freedom” or of “democracy,” neither of which is defined.  The evil intent of anyone opposed to them, however, must be virulently opposed.

We can Prudently see, now, that hatred is more than the first name of rule-breaking: it’s the only name of rule-breaking.  It manifests as lying, and therein lies the complexity of hatred: the myriad kinds and styles of lies that are told to us and by us.  The struggles between truth and lies describe most of human history.  Prudence thinks humans have become LESS truthful over the centuries that have led us to today.  Certainly this is true for the United States.  Can we keep excusing lies from various groups, agencies and institutions simply because the liars believe what they are saying?

The great painting called “Life” is still beautiful, but becoming less so at a frightening rate.  The single metric of suicides teaches us that increasing numbers of humans no longer perceive any beauty in living.  The great lie of abortion has blazed the trail… no – blazed the 8-lane expressway toward death as a “solution” to the problems of life.  Great, ugly swaths of the painting have beaded-up, unblended colors that look muddy rather than vivid, because of abortion.  Will truth ever overwhelm the hopelessness of abortion?

Nearly as much of a blemish on the painting called “Life” are the compound lies of transgenderism.  Here, the merchants of Death convince very young people to commit “suicide of the self,” even as they convince their parents that those same merchants are “educators,” preparing their children to be successful citizens of the United States of America.  Each child was born to be a certain person, a certain soul, and to conquer the challenges for that person, male or female.  Instead they are coached to either become sex objects at grade-school ages, or to “kill” their selves by undoing their sexual being with a grand pretense that it is possible to believe two diametric ideas simultaneously.  It is a means to living a lie, also destroying reproductive viability.  As it has spread through education in many states and countries, the painting has become duller, with sharp edges between vibrancy and death and dullness.

The elements of vibrant, vivid paint, including the color of love and not of death or hatred, still exist, and there are yet a few million of the artist’s apprentices still active and available.  We who are given the opportunity to co-create our painting – which represents a lot of faith on the part of the artist – often lose sight of the harmony and natural beauty that we have taken for granted.  For a hundred reasons we insist on trying to blend ugly, dull colors, believing that our odd intentions will render a better beauty than that created for us by the artist.  Yet our ugly paints keep beading up and leaving growing patches of ugly dullness amidst the original beauty.

Still, we push on, insisting that we know better than the artist of our life painting.  As the blemishes expand, those stuck in the ugliness try to blame the co-creators of beauty for the contrast, as though reducing the overall quantity of beauty and harmony would make everyone feel accepted and grant equity to all.  To their dismay, however, the rules of freedom don’t allow for it and, to the purveyors-of-ugliness’ horror, those are the rules of beauty, as well.

Education, Family, Health Care

A BEAUTIFUL DASH

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2001

In Methuen, Massachusetts a young woman is trying to prepare for a very early death.  It’s not her fault; she’s done nothing wrong in her nearly 27 years.  Indeed, from the very first she has been a bright, delightful person, quick to learn, quick to love pretty much everybody.

Inside her genes, however, something is not the same as most people’s.  She can’t fight off dysfunctional cell growth.  Her first cancer arrived when she was about 6, it’s not completely certain when, but she had been complaining of “back pain” for months before her mom finally got her to a “pediatric gastroenterologist” whose connections at Tufts Floating Hospital for Children found and diagnosed neuroblastoma.  There can be no worse day for a mother, unless it’s the one approaching inexorably, almost exactly 20 years afterwards.

That’s a short dash, 27 years.  In between those dates were 5 big battles with cancer, excellence in school, swim team, graduation from High School, excellence in college that included trips to New Orleans to help repair Katrina-damaged homes, trips to England and Ireland, visit to Paris through the Chunnel, Graduation from Wheelock College, Masters degree through Merrimack College, friends’ weddings, even one she coordinated, a trip to Peru and Machu Picchu only to run headlong into the fifth cancer struggle, now stretching into the last.  Loving teaching, early childhood and special needs, was not enough.  There never will be the full-time teaching position of which she dreamed.

How does one prepare for death?  I don’t know.  My good friend, Tony Fusco, prepared for his when an undiagnosed tumor in his brain stem proved inoperable, impossible to biopsy and ultimately fatal.  I got to sit with him the last Sunday afternoon before he re-entered the hospital to try some other treatments multiple neurologists had only the faintest idea might help.  I’d brought some nice scotch thinking we might enjoy a sip together but his gag reflex was so impaired he dared to sip only water.  It was a good afternoon and I expected he’d be home again.

When the only option of a feeding tube was offered, Tony realized – decided – that it was a tube too far: no further treatments, thank you.  His world shrank to a room at a beautiful hospice facility that was always busy with visitors and family.  He had a huge heart; it took a couple of weeks for it to go to sleep.

Clearly he’d prepared for the end.  He was 71.  At his funeral I told him that I knew where to hide a flask for when I’d join him on a porch where he now lived, where we could enjoy a sip and analyze the world situation.  He was a year younger than me.

How does one prepare at age twenty-six and three-quarters? Without an abiding religious faith it is hard to imagine.  She believes in God, but hasn’t had a lot of religious education.  I try to explain, but it is uncomfortable, certainly it was a year ago when the lung cancer appeared.  It represented a third kind of cancer, and her tiny body could tolerate no chemotherapy.  They operated and radiated, but the treatment was still a variation of repair and destroy with the overarching hope that the cancerous cells might be killed before the patient, herself.  Her breathing hasn’t been very good – or comfortable – since then.  Within a couple of months lesions were found in multiple places: brain, bones, pancreas and more.  Now at Dana Farber, they’ve radiated as many places as possible and she’s been taking an oral chemo pill with side effects.  It tended to slow down the growth, but never stopped it and now isn’t slowing it much, either.

There’s only one door open to her… to a place where the weaknesses of her body will no longer be a problem – a place where her health will become perfect.  One needs a reason to hope in order to contemplate passing through that door, alone.  Observers might say that she has no choice so “…she just has to deal with it.”

What does that mean: deal with it?  If one has any trust in God it should be clear that trying to pass through when angry and bitter is probably not the right approach.  One school of thought is that when you pass you’ll find exactly what you believed you’d find.  If that is a fade-to-black scenario, and hopeless, then that is what it will appear to be.  I believe that there is an eventual judgment, an audit if you will, of how well your tests were passed – tests you knew were coming when you agreed to accept the lifetime just ending.  Your “you” or your soul, may or may not have aced everything.  The life just ended may or may not be the last one you need to make your ascension, but Redemption is the unfailing lesson of the Bible.  It doesn’t make sense that in the matter of life and death itself, that the opportunity to redeem oneself would be absent.

For the soul, the agreement to accept a new life that includes the needed tests, is the greatest act of love expressable.

Another path of spiritual guidance says that not only are we responsible for our un-passed tests, or “karma,” but also for our reason for being, our “dharma.”  Both are part of judgment.  The more aware we are while on this side of that door, the more likely we are to meet and exceed the reasons for this life.  Life is not a knife-edge: Hell on one side and the gift of Heaven on the other; it is a path made broad by our free will.  The choices we make have meaning.

When someone passes very young, there has been little time to make bad choices, which is to say, few sins have been committed.  At the same time, few opportunities have presented for passing tests.  Maybe a life that ends in youth is lived sacrificially so that those around you can pass their tests.  Living that life is your test: a unique expression of love.

From the limited, somewhat fuzzy understandings of a human lifetime, this is my most comforting perception of the young lady’s life: one of sacrifice.  Neither I nor anyone else on this side of the door is privy to the purposes of the lives of others, and barely able to grasp the meanings of our own.  Still, this observer has recorded no imperfections in our young patient’s life. 

Is she comforted thereby?  Does she perceive the success of her life?  Or does she feel she’s been punished or singled out for “bad luck?”  I try to tell her to not fall into those ideas, but to approach the door with an open heart and mind, accepting of the possibilities of immense love on the other side.

Something she has earned.

Culture, Education, Immigration, Race, Responsibility

SURVIVAL

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Define: Individual…

The ability to “conduct” politics is critical to the survival of democratic republics, most specifically, to the survival of this one, into which we have been most fortunate to be born or naturalized.  Prudence teaches that, as Benjamin Franklin wisely observed following the Constitutional Convention, we have “…a republic (only) if you (we) can keep it.”  What is required for a citizenry to “keep” its republic?

First, obviously, is citizenship, itself… a fascinating quality, uniquely so for the United States of America, and the most valuable quality for the nation’s education system to impart.  Before joining a political party, our citizens should all be members of the “U.S. of A. party,” in effect.  That is, we all should share the principles of “America.”  How is that accomplished?

First and foremost, we must agree on the meanings of words and, simultaneously, on the meaning of laws, starting with our bases of right and wrong.  Just suggesting such a radical idea will generate heated argument, if not violence in certain venues, today.  Here in 2019, just 220 years since the Constitution was ratified, Americans no longer agree on very basic word definitions, starting with “nation.”

Those who now want to defend the borders of their “nation” are called “nationalists,” a term so pejorative as to be synonymous with Nazism.  Clearly the use of the word “nation” is close to the word “national” and the NAZIs were “National” socialists, meaning that they were transformed from socialists into right-wingers bent on either lynching a brown person or gassing some Jews.  I mean, “Duuuhhh.”  It is the same as owning slaves to be a foul “nationalist.”  It’s just like, ummm… Republicans.

So, principled conversations have become both tedious and more difficult.  Another bad word is “abortion” or, even more prejudicial: “infanticide,” or, “life,” itself.  Abortion is the epitome of goodness and deep caring about civil rights, in today’s lexicon, when it used to mean the premature and usually violent ending of the miracle of life in the womb.  So clearly it can neither be worried about or discussed, since it is settled civil rights “law.”  People with the temerity to question the beauty of abortion or who might suggest that the effects of rampant, profit-making abortion could be somehow bad for the “nation” or for our social communities, can be attacked physically, spat upon, kicked, thrown down to the ground and even worse.  No one will make much of a stink.

Governments have even created safe zones around abortion mills (sorry), “clinics,” so that those preparing to accept the sacrament of ending their child’s life, will not, themselves, be made uncomfortable.  I mean, “gosh,” after all.

States are finding their voice regarding abortion, passing various restrictions on when it is legal to kill unborn children.  One is based on whether a heartbeat has reached detectability, which is somewhere around 6 weeks after conception.  Others use a “principle” called “viability,” which is when modern technology can enable the fetus to survive outside the womb, generally successfully, while the, now, baby completes gestation and is able to mature with normal maternal care at home.  Viability seems to be around 24 weeks after conception, or two-thirds of a normal pregnancy “term.”

Opponents of these concerns, and these are among the most strident of advocates America has ever heard, pooh-pooh all of these calculations about life, and insist that death is somehow better and better serves everyone involved, but to do so they have to change the definition of “life, unborn, baby and offspring.”  Those words are relatively meaningless if the confused or weak-minded “mother” doesn’t “want” the child, baby, offspring.

Consequently craven politicians make what they think are legal laws based on the feelings of the weak-minded or weak-hearted proto-mothers.  The ramifications are grievously complex.  In the case of a new mother who takes her baby home from the birthing center but, for some reason, loses control under the new stresses of motherhood and kills the new child: she has committed a crime and will be arrested.  But, in the case of a new mother whose child survives abortion, which happens when abortion is performed late-term by a “doctor” who hasn’t practiced snipping the baby’s spinal cord before complete delivery, for example, she has no responsibility to the baby who, despite his or her automatic citizenship, may be allowed to starve to death on a table someplace near where it was delivered and NO ONE has any criminal liability.

Prudence wonders if those tables have a special, descriptive name, like every other piece of “medical” equipment. 

At one time, doctors swore to “first, do no harm.”  Indeed, they became doctors and joined an industry the mission of which used to be helping people overcome… oh, injuries, diseases, old age and other life-threatening conditions.  Unfortunately, politicians are unable to allow big economic functions to carry on successfully, and this politicization of medicine is reducing the money that can be made doing all the things we thought doctors were sworn to do.  The big money is in abortion, now.  Politicians are urging each other to send more money into the abortion industry, and then fight off every attempt to limit abortions, while placing restrictions on top of restrictions for the life-saving arena of doctor-activities.

Doctors, of course, worked their fingers to the bone, so to speak, to become doctors, and figure that the rewards should be commensurate – they’re not stupid, obviously.  Consequently, many are learning and practicing how to help the almost-born overcome LIFE.  Life is now a disease that doctors can cure.  What did you think you knew?

Fascism and Fascist are two words we can’t seem to agree upon the meanings of.  Those who are acting exactly like, umm… well, fascists, seem to believe that they are courageously fighting fascism.  This disconnect interferes with useful discussion and, unfortunately, interferes with sworn “peace officers” actually defending public order when faced with “Antifa” chaos, lest they “enflame” the situations.  When government policy is senseless, the sensible are left speechless.

Some Americans – and other residents – are unable to accept the meaning of “immigrant.”  While it is true that native-Americans (which is a meaningless term, itself; indigenous peoples got here before Europeans did, but there was no “America” then, making the term, “aborigines” the only accurate one) were able to roam around as far as their war-making prowess enabled, they had no concept of “immigration,” today a distinct and legal condition.  They understood “invaders” though, by whatever words they described unwelcome “others” who threatened their lands and way of life.  They understood ethics better than many “others” do even now, and the concept of “theft.”

“Others” stole their lands and lives and very ways of life, often by creating treaties that aborigines agreed to, but which were quickly abrogated by their “other” treaty-creators.  Those sensitive to honesty, today, are painfully aware of the lies told against aboriginal peoples.  Lying is the distillation of not agreeing on word meanings, and it can threaten everything a people holds dear.  Back to “immigrant.”

We no longer live in a society where people can just slide onto one another’s land or appropriate their means of living.  The concept of private property is the basis of economics and social order, itself.  The need to strive to obtain the means to survive, protect and shelter oneself and one’s family, also provides the opportunity to be charitable toward others – often to sacrifice for others.  In order to “emigrate” to another country, a person must accommodate the legal strictures of his or her intended new home country and, in some cases, the strictures of his or her present country.  It is part and parcel of adopting a new “citizenship” which carries with it significant legal sanctions and benefits.  It is not a simple condition of location.

So, an “immigrant” must have a status defined in law, else he or she is simply a law-breaker… which is to say, a criminal.  The legal adjudication of that criminal’s status is a matter for the illegally adopted country to perform.  Otherwise, that person is not an “immigrant” at all, but a thief.

These are but a few examples of words the definition of which – specifically the disagreement over those definitions – threatens the existence of the United States and some other nations, as well.  Words have meaning, tied to the meaning of “truth.”

One other example is the word, “racism.”  Racism is a social concept that is based on an undefinable term, thus yielding a meaninglessness that enables the epithet, “racism” to be used with little connection to any of the circumstances that inspire its use.  Racism, epithetically, infers some group membership, of those so accused.  That is, the accused must be prejudiced against another group, presumably based on surface, observable traits.

Usually this refers to “white” people who are accused of a variety of wrong feelings, or thoughts, toward, usually, brown-skinned people.  Now, brown skin covers a broad swath of human beings who cannot by any measure be considered racially singular.  Anthropologists have tried dozens of ways to “define” races and every classification system immediately is challenged by freshly observed biological distinctions that must be shoe-horned into the supposed standard classifications.  In short, there certainly are biological “races” but it is nearly impossible to identify them, so “racism” is reduced to mere political advantage, today.

This is not to say that terrible actions haven’t been taken against people – of all shades of skin color – by countries, states, counties, towns, mobs and, in truth, individuals.  But, except for individuals , official, legalistic discrimination and worse bad actions have ceased in the United States.  Why has “racialism” increased?  Why have the accusations of “racist” and “racism” become more commonplace?  Politics – not logic, not biology, not science, not group connection – politics, through which racialist grouping by the most superficial of distinctions, can produce a sort of “groupthink” that yields “group-voting.”  For shame.

Our Constitution embodies the greatest spirit of individualism  ever made nationally  foundational in human history.  Individuals are required to be responsible to themselves and to others, a radical idea.  It marked the intentional, codified rejection of serfdom… the rejection of monarchy… the rejection of tyrannical control of others, altogether.  In other words, individuals  are sovereign under the Constitution.  As a result, the government was formed by communities of individuals, each of whom relinquished limited amounts of that sovereignty so that all may benefit.  The government was formed to serve its sovereign citizens, and not the other way around.

Now, we see our democratic, individual political powers being defined by false connection to arbitrarily defined groups.  Nothing more threatens our national cohesion and our nationally protected individual liberties.  Group membership yields group responsibility, the fundamental destruction of individuality and individual responsibility.  It is antithetical to our Constitution.  Billions call it socialism.