shaving my ears; I'm forty-two, and hair comes from everywhere—nose, ears, earlobes, and even from the top edge of my ears. Rogue hairs, isolated from all others, coarse, scraggly, long, and gross in my opinion. I mow them down while listening to CNN's coverage of all the insanity in Florida. It makes spring break look tame.
There are lawyers my age, a few older, and an awful lot who are younger. These are astounding events, with Judges sitting for eleven hours in a day, and dueling Courts Supreme. And the whole fight for President of the United States is between these two choices: a bag of sawdust, and a post.
This nation's disgust for the Washington game, which has been building for decades, was expressed in this election with an almost super-natural wisdom, by our simple refusal to play. They asked us who we want, and our response was an amazingly precise ambiguity, which vigorously exclaims: Neither one! We added this caveat; you [the politicians] have to figure it out now, without our help, while we watch. The public's frustration with its politicians' petty bickering and repeated failures to reach consensus in the past, has been eloquently expressed by forcing those politicians to contend with our failure of consensus now. Their current predicament is a bitter irony, and I am loving every minute.
has it ever not been 'us' and 'them'? Can I not recall a time, in my young innocence, when I viewed the world as more than merely a collection of adversaries and competitors? parents versus youth, teachers versus students, students versus each other, nation versus nation, and fanaticism versus freedom. A time unlike the present, in which super-polluter General Electric fights the Environmental Protection Agency, and good people everywhere—who really do love the Earth, but also happen to have growing portfolios—just can't find their tongues. Can I not recall a time before I let reality and all its vibrant colors, sharp contrasts, deep agonies and exultant joys sink beneath the insulating sea of un-awareness.
I tell myself not to get carried away with metaphors like I just did, but there are scandals, tragedies, and vast injustices that never break the surface of our unwillingness to see. Those wrongs are very real, but in a world where they are not allowed to exist, a world where we refuse to see, the only way to refer to them is metaphorically.
Who killed Pope John Paul I? I had heard peripherally news about the Vatican Bank scandal shortly after His Holiness' elevation. Very soon after his death, I had formed the opinion that natural causes were not the case. He was not politically savvy; he was saintly. Ironically, I don't believe he was a player in the 'unawareness game'. That's the game in which all the players agree upon a contrived 'sea level', thus separating the things to be ignored as though unreal, from the things remaining 'visible'. The game reduces many monumental 'problems' to tiny islands, which only peek above the surface. And it elevates many puny souls to prominence by artifice. But the game demands that all players forfeit integrity. I believe John Paul I preserved his integrity, engaging in none of the games of contemporary politics. He chose to remain spiritually awake and true to himself. The irony is that choosing awareness does not necessarily make you privy to diabolic secrets; often, it makes you a target of them.
The thugs had their own reasons for killing John Paul I, and their reasons dovetailed nicely with the needs of others who were heavily invested in the unawareness game.
perhaps the best meaning of politic—beyond its proper definition—describes a quality of taking everything into account; a quality of awareness, with an acceptance that there exists a game of unawareness which many play believing it's the only game there is, a game which some play knowing the deception for what it is, and a game which a precious few both understand, and from which they choose to stand apart.
And while I'm talking crazy... JFK's assassination was a coup d'etat; Oswald never fired a shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Nor did James Earl Ray, in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
It scares me now, when I wonder why they stopped shooting. Isn't there anybody who scares them anymore?
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