I don't even know if I really want this program.  But the author's license agreement makes me want to download and use it for this line alone:  "But if you like it, I ask of you one thing: say a prayer..."

If you have twenty minutes, and a fearlessly open mind, read this.  Read it all.  Then read it all again.  I did two nights ago, and I never slept. 

Do not be afraid, but do be aware.

Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-South Carolina

Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Maryland

Sen. Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisconsin

Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vermont

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii

Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia

WHERE IN THE WORLD Among 18- to 24-year-old Americans given maps: 87 percent cannot find Iraq 83 percent cannot find Afghanistan 76 percent cannot find Saudi Arabia 70 percent cannot find New Jersey 49 percent cannot find New York 11 percent cannot find the United States from CNN.com

This should make certain narrow-minded leaders very happy.  If we don't know where we are, we can't much assess where we are going.  And that is exactly where the empowered elite want their soldiers to be.

Eleven percent cannot find the United States on a map.  Twenty nine percent cannot locate the Pacific fucking Ocean!  This is beyond xenophobia, which at least requires a cognizance of something else on the planet (gasp! perhaps they are not even aware they are on a planet...).  This is Dick Cheney's fighting Uruk-Hai, a mindless fighting force which their masters can simply point and shoot.  Right now, the target is Iraq.  But such a versatile weapon—bereft of moral misgivings—can be re-targeted with little or no coaxing upon the so-called enemy within, dissenting Americans who object to the exsanguination of American freedoms and who hold antique notions about liberty and justice. 

Swallow your coffee hard, and turn the page.  Forget about my irritable, paranoid ranting.  But if we continue to tolerate the progress of tyranny in the most powerful nation of the free world, our subtle indifference will have epochal reverberations.  If you don't care about the future—or if you just plain don't care—then never mind.  And if you are a cynic like me, then just sit back and watch the amazing demise of the most magnificent experiment in human freedom history has known.  But if you care—and this is a significant distinction—if you care, then you have to do something, even if the cause is hopeless.  Compassion does not spring from a promise of reward; indeed it blossoms best in the flickering light of hope beseiged.  If you care...

I'm numb with sugar but can't go back to sleep for the caffeine, so here's the most original, perceptive, and insightful thing I could come up with; Googlism for joe.

It's all I have to show for the seven hours since I crawled up off the futon and onto the chair.

And...  Hey!  —let's be careful out there. 

Note to self: Be somewhere dark during the night of November 18. (More precisely, November 19, at 4:00 AM)

John was recounting the most recent episode of his endless pursuit of sex; earlier today he had found a particularly choice morsel online, whom he hopes to meet later. 

"Do you know that we live in a country that is the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany?" I asked.

"Of course!" he replied without hesitation.  This surprized me. 

"Do you care?"  I knew the answer, but as I asked the question I realized, with a horror in the pit of my stomach, that I was face to face with the very demon that will destroy us. 

"No, I just want to find some hot piece and..."  (Risque drivel omitted.) 

The demon is our apathy.  We tolerate state-sponsored assassinations, justifying it by narrow illogic that fails, fantastically, to recognize how it duplicates the crime.  At the same time as we abdicate our responsibility to oppose such crimes, we are also forfeiting individual liberties under the fiction that state control of the individual will somehow preserve individual liberty.  This is an obvious contradiction, but we don't care, as long as we can maintain the American Dream—a home, a car, a comfortable life.  Secret trials take place, and individuals are unconstitionally imprisoned, but we refuse to recognize these crimes because the victims are not americans—not entitled to the dream.  And we don't care as we cling to the disintegrating tissue of our dream. 

There was some relief in recognizing this demon-apathy.  Knowing the cause of the disease, no matter how intractable—even when the prognosis seems hopeless—is at least an anchor-point in reality.  Truth, no matter how unpleasant, is where hope must start.  Built on any other foundation, hope will fail. 

From there we can begin to hope—if we are to hope at all. 

The party of power has won everything.  The Senate and the House are theirs.  Today the United Nations' Security Council abdicated its right to dissent and allied its authority with US imperial supremacy in a stunning unanimous adoption of its Iraq resolution.  Also, maybe this is not related to the Republican election sweep, but the day after election results, federal charges were dropped against the Washington snipers so that they could be tried in Virginia, where federal law does not prevent the seventeen year old from being executed.  I suspect the government hesitated until it was sure there was no Democrat-controlled Senate to offend.  From now on they will resume with glee and impunity the selling-off of whole chunks of personal liberties, appointing treasonable justices, arranging for the execution of minors and bending the course of a nation to the will of a few. 

I feel as though there has never been so weak a voice as mine raised feebly against so great a roar of morally corrupt power and arrogance. 

But I know there have been thousands.  Through milennia individuals of compassion have sought fitfully to organize themselves under various political parties and social movements of every ilk, none with absolute effectiveness.  We have tried socialism, communism, and secularism.  We have occupied niches of moderation encased within movements whose goals were largely inconsistent with ours, like some religions, and variously flavored conservatisms.  In reaction to our feeling of helpless paralysis in the face of disaster, we have, on occasion, even joined up with organizations that advocate force and violence.  Though we need not be passive, we are largely pacifist. 

Whether these efforts through history have failed or not is debatable.  The present conditions, which I consider nightmarish, may simply be an educational opportunity proceeding directly from the many efforts made through millenia to promote human compassion.  The apathetic are never more than today poised to learn something from Emporer Bush and his court. 

There's been things I haven't mentioned, or haven't bothered to bring up.  Like the seizure, and it's commensurate dislocated shoulder which happened at the end of September.  Like my best friend getting violently fired from the job where we both worked, the job I am now at a loss to hate as much as I would like.  Like this hole a surgeon left in my tongue that makes everything oral an agony, every taste a wincing sting, every effort to swallow a risk of gagging suffocation, every spoken word a rasp against raw flesh.  And before last week most things oral were ecstasy for me, so that's a big hit to take, even with the OraJel and the Vicodin. 

But speak here of these things, I did not. 

There's friends I don't call, whose calls I do not take, or return.  There's the young man I love—and have for twenty years—who is in jail right now, and despite his almost daily tomes, I fail to produce a letter for him any more than once every two weeks.  He wants me to come and visit him, so he can show me how big he's gotten.  But I dread it.  For a long, long time he's been far too big for me.  Once it felt good to need him, it was such a comfort to have him close.  We grew apart, and now I feel my need for him more acutely than I ever did before.  It's become uncomfortable.  Not only that, but I do not leave my solitude except on essential errands which require only brief excursion out of isolation.  He would always come to visit me, just to say hello, to talk, to remind me that's he's my friend.  I dread to venture out on quests to visit others, even to visit others whom I cannot live without. 

In the end, nothing positive can be tolerated, for compassion is infectious.  It spreads from minor sympathies and emotional insignificances, from negligible events of kindness and seeks to meet ever greater needs, calling out of its hiding place the pain within.  Compassion's desire to confront agonies is cumulative, it demands to meet the next more deeply buried demon.  It draws into the open—to itself—the horrors from which I prefer to hide.  It uncovers the seething, stinking, rotted-death, baby-eating, heart-chomping, bone-crunching monsters from which I think my hiding has made me safe.  Compassion calls these vicious killers into light, not to their defeat, but to their healing. 

Am I myself cold and cruel for evading compassion and keeping it from healing such tortured wounds?  Or am I just a tiny child too terrified to ever see those magnificent wounds again?