How Far?

The lengths we go to to maintain "normalcy." And what this costs us.

Overlooking the Sea, oil on canvas

I began writing this on the first of January…

Our Predicament has dominated life on Earth for all of my life. Its roots go back thousands of years, but the consequences have only come home to roost in glaringly obvious ways over the last thirty? Sixty? years. How about since the turn of the Millennium? That’s a good round number. All of the tipping points; any awareness that reality operates via dynamics and not polarities; have been making themselves known in increasingly obvious and undeniable ways since then.

Yet here we are, at the start of Twenty Twenty Four. A new reality, actually a new understanding of a long-existing reality, is increasingly undeniable. We have entered the time of Democide.

Demo: the people, as in everyone. Cide: killing. Not some passive voice, “passed away” or “lost their lives,” as if life itself were some possession that some people are just too careless to keep track of in the way corporate media attempt to describe away mass-murder, glossing over genocidal intent, and chilling depravity. Killing.

This transition is a question of degree. The degree to which what in hindsight is obvious, but also alarmingly, not surprisingly invisible to most everyone until the last few months. What the empire is doing in Gaza. What can be seen if one makes any minimal effort to look. This is a Genocide. The killing of a People. As we take this realization and apply it retrospectively we begin to see this for what it is, as a continuation of business-as-usual. It is far from an anomaly. It is in no way unique, or singular. It is only the brutality of the “optics,” as socio-technocrats like to frame things, that have changed. We get to see the horrors of Righteousness without any cover. We see the end-game of Ideology. Life-times of running away from difficulties by chasing after Power always lead to a suicidal run away from any contact with reality until it can no longer be avoided. And, even then, on the stairs down into their final bunker, the perpetrators drop all pretense and attempt to go out in a final blaze of mass-destruction fueled by bottomless hatred.

A small side note: As with everything psychopaths do, and many things everyone does, whenever they seek justification for hate and destruction they will project their own fears for the consequences of their own actions onto those they have chosen as their scapegoats. It’s no wonder the obsession over destroying tunnels and bunkers. Even when they repeatedly turn out to be imaginary. These are premonitions of their own ends. Nemesis does force insight onto those it destroys…. To the oppressed and imprisoned a tunnel is a means of escape, way out of Hell and towards living. For the destroyers, the haters, the killers, a tunnel is merely a passage to their last resort. A tunnel to the Hell they have brought about. People tunnel to freedom. Killers tunnel into their bunker. A final refuge for all those who believe in Final Solutions.

Gaza may be the horrific face of our Predicament, but it is only a single front in the rise of Democide.

Another note: In our dominant understanding People is a term with a few competing definitions. Within the mythology of empire it is wrapped in the flag, “We the People!” Ignoring the intentional, by the “Founding Fathers,” reflection back to the People as the term was meant by the Romans. SPQRS. That “P” stood for Populis. Second only to the “S,” the Senatorial class that ruled over everyone and everything. “Things,” including a large portion of the actual human population of their City, their Republic, and the empire that sprang from its twisted and violent ideology. The Roman Populis was bound in Fascis, authoritarian “discipline, ”like the bundle of axe-handles, their metaphor for the power of a totalitarian “unity of intent.” The origin of both the term and the realities of Fascism.

To “The Left” People has a different connotation. In actual Communism as it was practiced, the People were those in whose names the rulers held everyone under a dictatorship. This is what happens when analysis is trapped within a binary view and a destructive ideology is countered by creating an opposing ideology which cannot help but be a mirror image of what it is attempting to save us from.

What is now increasingly coming clear, to anyone not mired in defensive hatred and the lust for Power, is that People, Person-hood, seeing others as in some way as valid and deserving of respect as oneself, is an expanding sphere. It is increasingly possible to hold a coherent cosmology/worldview in which everything; certainly everything we can consider alive, and most likely everything there is; is a co-participant in an unfolding reality in what David Bohm called the Implicate Order of the Universe. That, as is now also coming into view, the present Universe itself is but a single organism in an unfolding evolution of Universes carrying on through an infinity of time….

“Reasonability” demands we pause at such an “extremist” position! So say the rational among us, totally willing to quibble over the fine points of what constitutes a war crime or whether anyone can be held accountable for acts and omissions that they would prefer to ignore. One of the benefits of living in a time of revelations is the speed with which such reasonableness rings hollow once we give it the slightest scrutiny….

The other “out,” the advocates of Normalcy find comfort in is blaming everything on “Human Nature.” We may be this way, but what can we do about it? It’s human nature. It’s original sin…, etc..

I’ve resorted to a short-cut, a label, here before. Whiteness, a term I learned by reading James Baldwin, the writer who, over the course of my life I have found to have spoken most clearly and most directly to me, warning me about the perils of accepting the world and worldview I was born into and the need to seek solidarity with those who choose life over those who seek out death and destruction by chasing Power and feeding off of hate. He is known as a “Black Writer.” Someone to be read if you are interested in “Black Studies.” While both this categorization and endeavor may have been instigated in good faith, they miss the universality…, no, that’s not quite the right emphasis. Everything and everyone shares in a Universality. This approaches a banal truism.

Baldwin was an American Writer in that he lived in America, was shaped and damaged by American life. Spent decades in intentional exile from America, returning when he found he had no choice but to return and deal with what he was finding to be the inescapable realities of what America was/was becoming in the world. He wrote for Americans, and for America’s victims. He wrote for Americans, even for those who were making it into what we are now finally unable to fail to see that it has become/always was.

He was an American writer because, perhaps uniquely, he saw that it was those who identified as “White America” who were not only oppressors and perpetrators of horrific violence, but America’s first victims. That there would be no way through this reality without focusing on how and why this was and how it might be different.

He wrote to warn us. I believe one of his primary audiences, at least in his mind as is evidenced by the effort he put into directing his words at “white Americans,” were those in thrall of this toxic ideology.

Black Americans found corroboration in Baldwin’s words.

For me, as a teenager, struggling to come to grips with the season of assassinations and Napalm, watching him on Dick Cavett, debating William F. Buckley, spineless banal, evil incarnate; showed me what courage is. How a heart and a mind could integrate and find coherence.

Discovering his writing in college…. To be clear, college for me was a rare opportunity to find some way to make sense of a world where every possibility for Joy was entangled in a personal and public version of Hell. Where every option available to me, as I saw it, was wrapped in the prison of double-binds. Where my life depended on coming across some trail, some example, some hint that any of it could be made whole…. Baldwin was talking to me.

Coming back to his work in mid-life. Discovering how his descriptions of what it meant to be Black, what it meant to be human, were in no way hyperbole. He could not be explained away. Could not be ignored…. Except that he was ignored by the audience he sought. By those who he could have helped the most. By those he recognized to be the greatest danger to themselves as well as to everyone and everything else.

This protracted aside has been necessary. Reading, listening to Baldwin, especially right now. If you haven’t…. Even if you have….

I find that spending even these brief paragraphs, celebrating perhaps my most significant elder, has provided a great relief amidst the onslaught we face. There are many avenues for Joy, even now. The Joy in celebrating a life focused on integration, of the self, of people…. Early on, even as a kid who was taught to fear and suspect anyone who wasn’t “white.” I found my greatest Joy. My greatest sense of visceral belonging whenever I had even the briefest and peripheral contact with Black Americans and their culture.

Today, the only redeemable aspects of our American Experience in my estimation derives from the lives and experiences of Black Americans. The only positive religious influences, the depth and wellspring of culture growing out of the way a people who were brought here in the most horrific and violent manner and who found that in extremis; unlike what Whiteness attempts to insist; people find survival in facing reality together and that solidarity and love and forgiveness and acceptance – not only of what must be endured but what can be enjoyed…. That a living culture is possible and it is not found in mausoleums and museums, endowed by mass-murderers.

Today the place where this is also becoming increasingly self-evident is in Palestine, or the ghetto of it that remains in the ruins of Gaza. What the fearful and hatred filled cannot abide is that those they target might have more dignity and freedom in their despair, in their martyrdom, than they can muster, wrapped up in the chains of their own lust for power.

What remains is for these revelations to coalesce into a realization that the forces of Democide are all linked. They have the same sources. They act in the same manner. They seek the same result. The death of everyone and everything, culminating with their own self-immolation in the holes they have been digging for themselves. In their Final Solution. At the bottom of their bunkers.

If this realization can realize itself in our hearts their power will fail. As power always does.

OK, one last aside: As John Michael Greer has recently observed, we are trapped within a manufactured mythology based on the motives of those who have profited from debasing mythology and replacing any possibility of arriving at a vital cosmology with a dangerously flawed expectation that evil is the other and Good triumphs simply because it is good. There are flavors of Righteousness and expecting that announcing that one is on the right side of history is just as vacuous and dangerous as chanting after the next Millennial Reich.

Power seeking fails because Nemesis destroys those who fall for Power’s false promises. Nemesis does not discriminate between those who actively pursue power and those who simply accept Power because of…, Normalcy?

The choice we face is between falling victim to Nemesis because of what we fail to acknowledge because it’s too hard. Daring to consider that standing up to the entire concept of chasing after Power and refusing its enticements is an option at all.

This, as with anything real, does not promise any physical salvation. Things have gone so far. The tipping points are tipping faster and faster….

This is our only chance. Our only chance at anything real. At anything that might still be possible.

And beyond this, it is our only chance to recapture or even just discover what used to be called soul….

Democide. Realize that it is an active thrust to do to all of us what has been done piecemeal before. It intends to spare no one. We are getting a rare glimpse, not just in grainy black & white film clips or the musty pages of old books, but live-streamed around the world. In full color, with sound. The sickening grins of boastful perpetrators, the quiet nobility and the uncensored open and raw grief and pain of their victims. All in their own words. All by their own actions. Snipers targeting people the way budding psychopaths squash ants. Exhausted and targeted journalists sweeping up at an impossibly dysfunctional but still operating hospital.

They all show us the limits of our own imaginations for both good and ill. They show us the poverty of limiting ourselves to the defenses of a hideousness that maintains its evil by hiding behind what we consider “normal.”

This is no time to remain normal….

Stand up against normalcy. recognize that the urge for normalcy is killing us. It provides the space, the room, the energy for Democide.

And Democide is coming after all of us.

Even if we are reduced to two choices, which may be all we can see from our position, hiding behind normalcy. Do you want to be alive while you can? Or, do you want to race for a space in that bunker?

If there are other options they will only present themselves if we choose life.

The trouble with confronting Our Enormity is that…, well, it is all encompassing. To put it bluntly, it’s enormous and seemingly boundless. This holds true for each of its components as well. It’s easy to fall into the enormity of this current genocide and find that it eclipses everything. The trouble with this approach is that it leads to limiting one’s perspective and makes it easier to begin to fall for alleged solutions, ultimately just different flavors of the kind of thinking that brought us here.

As hard as it is, it is important to look at how all the aspects of Democide work and how our desires for normalcy put us into greater danger while promising us that we might avoid consequences simply by wishing dangers away. Getting caught between the Scylla And Charybdis of either prioritizing our fears and acting monstrously or ignoring real dangers and acting irresponsibly, making things more unstable and fearsome in the process.

Covid; the fact that we have been and continue to be in a major Pandemic and that all of the forces aligned with Democide actively minimize the possibility of mitigating it; is a major expression of our Enormity. It and our reactions and lack of true responses intersects with two other major elements of Our Enormity: The Derangement of Our Climate and the normalization of willful killing and destruction. Each of these intersect with each other and with Genocide and broader Ecocide and they all work within loops and cycles of vicious circles.

The current, actively pursued Democide could not take place without people actively choosing access to Power and Wealth over survival. This has always seemed crazy. It still does, but that doesn’t make it any less true. We’re all familiar with the adage that one’s greatest fortune is good health…. Countless other examples of peasant wisdom have been ignored for a very long time. The destructive concepts known of as Wetigo have spread, “like wildfire” around the Earth, bringing almost everyone alive under its spell to some degree. This is an invitation to insanity. A willful, chosen insanity. An insanity whose most fundamental precept is that its adherents must forgo everything their natures might try to tell them about the dangers it presents and embrace self-destructiveness in the guise of “getting what I want.”

Once we believe this lie, the rest of the cult of power’s ploys are easily accepted until they become “second nature.” A sense of self that requires plenty of addictive “supplements” to maintain, while remaining in a “shared” delusion of power, mastery, and self-aggrandizement.

This lie is the foundation of Normalcy. Once this becomes clear a lot of our self-inflicted confusion begins to lift.

There are currently two political flavors of this core delusion. Conservative and Liberal, or more accurately Neo-Liberal. Each has a “vision” of what Normalcy should be and each finds the worst Hell in their opponents vision of Normalcy, giving them license to do “whatever it takes!” To ensure that their side wins and their enemies lose. Each of these corrupt-at-its-core views has its favorite victims to court and use as fearful examples of what their enemies are capable of. Each favors grievance over healing. Neither can maintain their false-existence without the ongoing threat posed by their opposite. This is how binaries work.

Every flash point in our ongoing Enormity is seen as a reason to double down on a bankrupt world view and attempt to force conformity against their enemies.

What makes the flavors appear as alternatives is that the Conservative version appeals to those who, having suffered in some way, seek vengeance. The Neo-Liberal version appeals to damaged people who prefer to hide their shadows, seeking social superiority and chasing power because it promises them ease. Neither sees their own faults. Both find the slightest deviation from their chosen path to be justification for ultimate retaliation.

For a long time, perhaps throughout the blink of a cosmic eye we know of as history, this kind of duopoly has been taking place. Until now, what no one has had available to them is a range of view, actual things that can be seen and not simply what fits within their blinders, that can show us how totally bankrupt, how completely futile and useless/worthless the continuation of this duopoly is. How it is the mechanism of our destruction as this is visible to us today if we care to look.

Meanwhile, “both sides” practice collusion to maintain what they all call normal as the only possible way to see the world. These are the only acceptable ways to be. All one can do is “pick a side.”

Gaza is unique. Not only have both sides dropped any semblance of disagreement over the basic matter at hand. Both agree that genocide is the profitable path. That their version of events is true against all the obvious and transparent evidence to the contrary. That their dissembling, projecting, avoiding, blaming, and hating; their killing and maiming is necessary and just. Each is willing to “other” some people at the expense of “other” people. Each is willing to keep doubling down, insisting that if you don’t join their side the other side will win. Of course the ultimate threat is that if that other side wins we will all pay a terrible price.

What they all are equally willing to agree on is ignoring that maintaining this “normalcy” is precisely how we will all end up paying that terrible price. Their enticements that “Our side will sacrifice you last, or close to last….” has begun to ring hollow. They are all parties to Democide, eager and willing to sacrifice everything to maintain control from within a delusion. The delusion that anyone can own, anyone can control, a world of people, a world of interconnected person-hoods.

Gaza is not unique in the way its real victims have responded. Outside of the pathetic imaginations of the Ayn Rand crowd and the hold they’ve taken on our public imaginations. This is how real people respond to Enormity. There is a spectrum of responses. The salient point that survival and love and connection and bonds are intertwined is not lost on them. Individually and as a People, the Palestinians have shown that when one faces existential danger hate and revenge are not at the top of one’s priorities. Leave that to the fearful projections of their oppressors.

Their response is not unique. Look back at the African American Experience. The Native American Experience…. What has been new is that we have an intimate, minute by minute view of the disparity between the behaviors of the aggressors and their victims. Our view is not mediated by the “cowboy & Indian” or the “master & darkies” mythologies that kept previous genocides and acts of severe oppression obscured. “Complicated” as current Israeli apologists like to say even now….

The duopoly, the forces of Democide, continue to attempt to force our perceptions into these kinds of framings. We’re coming off a twenty-plus year jag. Forty or more if we count from the first rise of Islamophobia after the “Seven Day War…” The obscenity of the War on Terror, its own part in our Enormity, continues to grow and spread…. Both sides…, here’s a good heuristic. Anyone pulling anything and claiming “both sides…” is culpable, delusional, and dangerous. Avoid. Both sides are eager to recruit anyone who, driven by discomfort over current conditions and naive about the nature of duopoly to their cause.

All of this is happening at a time when the most “Left” member of the DNC’s political party is to the right of John Birch. Don’t forget that Genocide Joe’s mentor was Strom Thurmond….

A plague on both their houses.