Do No Good

 

“No good deed goes unpunished,” my mother told me, often. I chalked it up to her sense of humor, until I realized what she meant. Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) echoed my mother’s words yesterday, when he said do not be a do-gooder. 

Well, he didn’t exactly say it yesterday.  He died three years ago. But, I listened to a two hour talk he did years ago that I happened across yesterday. I hadn’t read or heard him for decades.  But, when he popped up on YouTube on my iPhone, seemed like a good distraction. I was trying to avoid my book, They Want to Kill Americans, by Malcolm Nance. 

Brilliant book, but terrifying about the state of our country since the con man, Putin’s useful idiot, the orange Caligula, occupied our White House and encouraged every mentally challenged, mentally ill, angry, hate-filled, racist, paranoid, and heavily armed militant to come out of the woodwork to start a revolution in his honor. 

Trump was trumpeting the end of democracy in America.  He wanted to be king. And he told his violent supporters they needed to go “fight like hell” to get that golden crown and throne for him.

I can only take Nance’s book in snippets, it seems. Snippets probably being another term I inherited from my mother.  I want to be aware of what is going on in our country and the world, but I have to look away, or I’ll lose my mind with it all. 

I can’t look at the hell Putin is raining down on Ukraine’s population or I can’t stop crying.  I can’t even watch those ads asking us to help poor, abused pets. Yow.  And I need fluff escapist fare, too, at night before bedtime.  Otherwise, nightmares ensue.

I once woke up, during the days when I set a radio alarm for work, to news going into my subconscious. I was apparently not ready to wake up and get up, and the news just kept playing into my dreams. 

I had nightmares of holy terror happening around me. It was truly terrifying. I was happy to finally wake up and get out of that bloody war zone.  It’s not just yellow journalism, of "If it bleeds it leads," stuff. I guess the worst news sells the best. That’s why mainstream media gave us that traitorous crook constantly.  He made them big advertising bucks.  Sadly.  

I learned then to avoid reality before bed and upon waking. I saw a meme the other day that summed it up.  “Now I understand why roosters wake up and scream!”  

Only so much reality one can take in one setting.  As the saying went during the 60s/70s, “Reality is for those who cannot take drugs.” Reality can be a tough pill to swallow, especially now. Though my history buff friend tells me humans have always been this horrible. And Steven Pinker says we are less violent today than we used to be.  Yeah. We are no longer drawing and quartering people, I guess.   

I had, as you can imagine, and I can imagine you had, too, a very tough time since that lying, malignant narcissist stole the election in 2016 with help from Putin and company and began destroying our peace and our democracy. 

So, I needed something a bit more uplifting and hopeful yesterday.  I set aside Malcolm Nance’s well researched warnings and picked up the Ram Dass talk. I can’t, nor would I attempt to, encapsulate an entire two hour talk here, but bottom line, Ram Dass was saying, don’t do good. Be good. 

Jesus may have said something similar.  I think our being creatures with finite brains, precludes our actually being able to see or understand the big picture of life.  We just slog through our own darkness and often just project our own assumptions onto others and decide they need us to do something to make their lives better, when we don't even know what we're doing with our lives.  

We might think we are doing good and yet be making matters worse for someone or a bunch of someones. Maybe our trying to help someone who is just doing their own thing and struggling through as we all are, could make them want to punch us. Maybe it could come off as if we feel superior and they are inferior and in need of us.  I don’t know.  I’m trying to remember Bible lessons I learned nearly 70 years ago.

Malcolm Nance is just good. He doesn’t try to do good. He’s currently in Ukraine fighting to help Ukrainians save their democracy, while warning US that we are a gnat’s wing away from losing democracy here, too. He cares.  He fights for what he sees as right and against what he sees as clear and present dangers. Trump and Putin are both huge clear and present dangers to both our country and the world, and humanity at large.  

I recommend everyone read this latest Malcolm Nance book, (Profits all go toward helping Ukraine, and they do need help.), as well as all his books.  But, I also recommend taking a vacation often from the stress of trying to face reality. Hearing Nance tell us that January 6, 2021’s violent take over of our Capitol was probably a dress rehearsal, is agida inducing, to say the least. 

I am hoping that the January 6th Congressional Committee and the DOJ keep indicting Proud boys, Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers, KKK, Nazis, etc., and that judges give them long sentences and take away their rights to own guns. 

We need to send a message to all those dangerously brainwashed cult members that US democracy is not up for grabs, that autocracy and fascism are a beginning of the end of their freedoms and rights, as well as ours. They know not what they do. 

Jacosa Puella

August 29, 2022

As The World Burns

          

            As the planet combusts under the oppression of an unforgiving global climate crisis, 1,600 people died in Europe last week in their 104º heat wave; ice bergs continue to melt, raising ocean levels and drowning low lying islands and beaches; oceans heat and increase storm strengths, bleach coral reefs, increasing disease in plants and animals, spreading pathogens more easily and quickly in the warmer waters; old growth redwood forests are burning, and we run out of water in the drought-ridden and over-populated southwest that we need to extinguish wildfires and take care of a thirsty growing population, Republicans, and a certain Democrat or two, continue to deny there is even a climate issue. They vote against doing anything about anything.               

                    If it is not about giving tax cuts to the top 1%, gerrymandering distracts to favor themselves, or taking voting rights away from minorities, or healthcare rights away from women, the GOP is not interested in passing any legislation.

Their party (cult) has no platform, no policies.  Their only goal is to obstruct Democrats from getting helpful legislation passed in order to make Democrats look ineffectual, or worse, so they can blame Democrats for all that ails the US so they can win back Congress and the WH.  They count on voters not doing their own research.  They just continue to repeat their lying campaign rhetoric.

It is so expensive to run for office, (Thank you, SCOTUS and Citizens United decision.), politicians spend a huge proportion of their time dialing for dollars.  And they must pay back those big coal and oil donors, who are responsible in large part for the heating planet, and oh, big Pharma, too, of course, by decreasing or erasing their tax bills. It’s all pay to play in America, never mind that we are killing ourselves.

I don’t know why Republicans seem to feel that they, their children, and grandchildren are above it and will not be affected by this emergency.  It’s the theme of the movie, “Don’t Look Up.” 

A disaster looms, and yet, people, especially politicians, go about their mundane, myopic lives, chasing money and power, ignoring scientists’ warnings, as they are wont to do in disaster films.  

As we used to say, (from the old TV Chiffon Margarine commercials), “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” Or to fool with Mother Nature, in our current crisis. She always wins. And She is, apparently, fed up with the human species, which is, I’d say, the most destructive species that ever evolved.

What is the Republicans’ Plan B? Do they plan to ride Elon Musk’s rocket to Mars and stay there? And what is an even bigger mystery to me, is how do they convince people who are not worth billions to vote for them? They are voting against their own interests or really, voting for their own death sentence.

I think we can blame social media, maybe not completely, but quite a lot. It allows lies and conspiracies to travel around the globe before we can get our proverbial pants on. 

It’s not clear, but Jonathan Swift, (17th-18th century Anglo-Irish essayist, satirist, and political writer), may have started the concept of lies getting around faster than the truth, rather than Mark Twain or Winston Churchill, to whom those sentiments have often been attributed. 

Swift wrote:  “Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

As the saying, (Ecclesiastes 1:9) goes, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Humans have been, apparently, lying and cheating since we first evolved. The Bible says Adam and Eve even dared to lie to their all seeing/all knowing creator about the apple and blame the snake.  Not that that story is to be taken as more than a metaphor, but people still scapegoat to get out of trouble.

It’s just that with all of us around the world connected now, lies take purchase more easily and have a far greater staying power as they continue to go around and around, increasing in size and weight, as a snow ball does rolling down hill.

Social media is terrific and terrible at the same time, the worst and best of times. Personally, for instance, I don’t know how I got along before the internet (and google).  Britannica Encyclopedias took so much work and they could never be completely up to date or cover everything you wanted to know. And the dictionary and Thesaurus I carried everywhere, when I was younger, eventually fell apart. 

Now everything we need, (don’t need and/or don’t know we need,) is right at our fingertips. But, it comes with a big price, the ubiquitousness of mendacity, as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Big Daddy used to rail.  Or as he said, “There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity… You can smell it.  It smells like death.  Mendacity is a system in which men live.”

I have family (Evangelical Republicans) who still think the former guy, Trump, (TFG) is POTUS and that he is a good guy who was sent by God to save America.  Save America from democracy, it seems.

When I give them facts and links to statistics and information, I’m told it is “fake news.”  Still, with all that has happened and even with TFG out of office, they remain loyal to the cult leader.  

Yesterday, a family member, who was messaging me to join a “Boycott Biden club,” asked me, when I told her who the lying grifter TFG, is and always has been, if I only get “filtered news?”  Filtered news.  They actually think the lies and conspiracies they are fed daily are the truth. So, when told facts, info, or news, they think it’s all lies.

What a mess TFG has made of our country. Granted, mental illness and mendacity have always been with us, but never have I seen such a prevalence of both, nor seen the insane lies so proudly and publicly proclaimed. 

They really think they are spouting truth to save our country from Democrats, who, of course, are blood thirsty baby eating pedophiles, and communists.  They cannot understand that they are helping usher in autocracy and fascism.

What TFG has done, other than nearly over-throwing our democracy with violence to install himself as dictator, is made it acceptable to be a crazy conspiracist.  He taught his cult to play victim and to try to rid the country of the godless left by whatever means.  He has made being ignorant and/or brainwashed and wearing a hat to declare it, acceptable, and in those circles a badge of honor.

As Catherine Fahringer from the Freedom From Religion Foundation said, “We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn’t been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake.”

They do not know what they do not know and if we tell them what they don’t know, they will, if they still could, burn us all at the stake for heresy. Well, today, they can just throw us into old growth forests.

Jocosa Puella

July 26, 2022

Things That Go Boom

     It’s July 7th.  Bombs are still exploding over LaLa Land. I was especially fond of the one that went off, what sounded and felt like, a matter of feet from my bedroom, at 12:50 this morning. 

After I got my heart started again, and climbed from the floor, back into bed, I was so grateful I don’t live in Ukraine. And then I felt even worse for the Ukrainians. Putin is an evil, monstrous terrorist. But, that is another topic.

Is giving people heart attacks in the middle of the night a sign of American patriotism?  Is that celebrating the birth of our democratic republic?  And do we still have a republic? 

The guys who are trying to get rid of all their leftover fireworks from the 4th seem to think they are still celebrating freedom. Freedom to blow up things.  And maybe they just like to hear things go boom!  Is that a guy thing? And why a late at night thing? Early this morning, that bang had more of a ring of revenge to it. But for what and against whom?

The love of things that go kaboom makes more sense to me.  They are probably the same guys who take the mufflers off their cars and race around our residential streets as though they are in a competition with other muffler-less drivers for their lives. Between those ear-splitting drag racers, the ubiquitous helicopters and sirens, it’s a wonder we aren’t all more sleep-deprived.

Probably, also, the same guys who are constantly flipping over cars in our streets.  I did read that deaths due to car accidents are on the rise. Is it that deafening (male?) speed-demon urge, or is it due to our devices we can’t seem to put down for a minute, even while driving, possibly on top of sleep-deprivation?

Those drivers and midnight firework bomb throwers are probably, also, part of the 54% (130 million) of 16-74 year olds in our country which has a below the equivalent of a 6th grade proficiency in literacy and reading, (per US Dept. of Education).  

Our country has been dumbed down to make it easier for the greedy and power hungry to get US citizens to vote against their own interests and to give them tax breaks, or no tax bill at all. I have known people who were poor, but felt one day they, too, would be wealthy, argue angrily for tax cuts for billionaires. Sucker born every minute?

Donald Trump being the consummate con man, convinced his brainwashed “suckers” that they were right to hate, bully, and even murder those who don’t look like them, have different skin tones, speak other languages, or belong to a different religion, etc.  He and his GOP henchmen convinced them that those “others” were trying to “cancel their culture.” And meanwhile, while they were distracted blaming those others, DT and GOP were stealing their money, their rights, and installing an autocracy.

This is why DT on his campaign trail told his audiences that he loved the uneducated, or was it the poorly educated? It is far easier to convince a non-critically thinking 6th grader that he needs to fear, hate, blame, and scapegoat others than it is to convince an educated and informed citizen. 

It’s also easier to use religion to make people fear and hate the other.  Go figure. Nothing says “God” like hate and fear and guns.  Go figure, too, that his “Christian” followers also put him in the same category with their Jesus, as the Second Coming. Fear and hate sell better than sex, apparently.  

DT got his cult followers to violently act out against their own country to save their country from “them.” Them, the educated?  The brown or black people? Democrats? Progressives?  Women? He got them fearing that if he was not in our White House, they would soon be forced to the back of the bus as they become the irrelevant minority. 

And in the back of the bus, their guns would be confiscated and their “power” and freedom would be robbed from them. The “Christian” SCOTUS is ending access to abortion and possibly to birth control soon, because they want more white babies born. Unwanted, poor, uneducated, easily controlled white citizens.

He and GOP have created very dangerous, heavily armed, under-educated, under-informed,  or completely lied to, mobs.  Take a look around.  Is this the America we grew up loving, celebrating, and thankful to for our freedoms? And I almost forgot to mention the 220 people shot and killed over the July 4, 2022 weekend. Thank God for the 2nd Amendment, NRA, SCOTUS, and the Republican party which protects our right to own, and carry everywhere, weapons of war on the streets of our country.

Is, as we keep being told, America on the verge of its second civil war? I’d vote to let the south and other brainwashed and/or ignorant states to secede this time. Why stop them? The blue states support the red states.  We will save a fortune and get our rights back. I think it’s time to say farewell and tell them not to let the doorknob hit ya where the good lord split ya on your way out.  And, oh, take your Christofascist form of repression with you. Thanks. 

Jacosa Puella July 7, 2022

Wake Them Up!

“Money is the root of all evil,” the young Armenian male bank teller said after explaining to me that he loves money.

Well, what’s not to love? I thought. As the old joke says, it’s way ahead of whatever is in second place. Well, we all know that love is the most important thing in the world and not in second place at all. But, really, when you have love and no money…? Doesn’t feel quite as first placey, somehow.

I heard about a study recently that said that most women, when questioned, chose more money a week in their checking accounts over having more sex. We've always been a more pragmatic gender.

One can buy sex. But, one can’t buy money. Gotta have it to buy it. And, as the song goes, your love doesn’t pay my bills. A male first must feather the nest with the finest to attract the finest females; I figure my young money-loving teller is figuring.

He told me he was studying to become a C.P.A. That's great, I’d said. That is a good job, always in demand in our tricky economic situation. I don’t know if he felt guilty from family influence, or a church, but it seemed he had a need, to let me know that he did know that money is bad.

I can’t imagine a parent telling a young man that wanting to earn money was evil. Maybe he attends an Orthodox church that promotes vow of poverty rhetoric. Rich man, camels, eyes of needles, and all...

Money isn’t the root of all evil, I told him. Selfishness and greed are. There is certainly nothing inherently evil about clam shells or whatever we used in our previous incarnations to pay for things. Receiving cash, clams, whatever, is just a thank you gift for your product or service.

If we lived in a less selfish society where we took care of each other and lived with a barter system, it would be better. I could give you a few dozen eggs from my free range, organically raised hens and tomatoes and zucchini and basil from my free of pesticides, organic garden for the rent. Win-win. And you are even healthier for having property to rent.

Only, it doesn’t work. We’ve grown to be too large a group. So, it’s paper, gold, silver, (copper mostly now), something concrete to hand over to say your work, service, property, is truly valued and appreciated.

If only we could get big biz to value, appreciate, and reward its workers. Instead, it’s pay as little as you can to keep your own salaries and bonuses astronomical.

What was it I heard Stephen Hemsley, the CEO of UnitedHealth, makes? I think I read $270,086.83 each month. But, I think that was before bonuses and other perks, like his retirement package. I hope he’s not covered by UnitedHealth. He earns(?) more than six times the average person’s yearly income in one month? And, again, that’s leaving out the more generous CEO perks. I heard someone say that Hemsley makes $100,000+ each hour. Wow. Now that’s greed.

Hemsley denies people’s health care needs for a living and he is richly rewarded for it. Now that is selfish. How does he sleep at night? He probably self-medicates, just as at least 46 million uninsured Americans have to do. He is evil.

And the rightwing puppets who are in the pockets of UnitedHealth Care and every other big insurance company and big pharma are, also, evil. They choose money over the welfare of the people they allege to represent, the people who voted them into their offices. The people who, out of their taxes, pay for their salaries and for their wonderful insurance coverage, are denied health care.

The screamers at the town halls who drown out the health care coverage messages, well, they're just ignorantly opposing their own best interests. They know not what they say or do. Forgive them, Jesus would say. But, I say, go out and scream over them. Yell the truth. Make them face reality. You'd be doing them a kindness. They are victims of the body snatchers. Wake them up!