The Struggle Feels Real

#shakespeare#snl#roseanneroseannadanna#mom#pogo#Jesus#intuition#highermind#planestrainsandautomobiles#costco#citizenapp#normancousins#anatomyofanillness#beatles#montypython#gunsafety

Life seems to be a series of struggles, or maybe just one constant, uninterrupted struggle. As humans, we seem to be forever up against what Shakespeare called, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” 

Or as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “It just goes to show ya. It’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” 

My mother used to tell us, “If it isn’t one thing, it’s 12 others.” That seems more realistic. She was not a Saturday Night Live fan. In fact, I’m pretty sure her words preceded SNL’s existence. 

She would also remind us to not take ourselves too seriously.  She felt it would save us angst by not being too dramatic about things, I guess. She was the stoic type. She had a great sense of humor and I only saw her cry twice in my life, when a very close, dear friend and a relative died.

I later thought of it as my mother saying, as Jesus did, be in the world, but not of it. As in not buying into your self-important ego? Or as Pogo said,“Don’t take life too serious; it ain’t nohow permanent.” 

Mom was not a Pogo fan, nor did she quote Jesus or attend church often. So, I guess just navigating her own life made her a philosopher. Or maybe it was her Capricorn sensibilities. No drama. Just practicality.

We encounter forked roads daily. So, we learn to choose which way to turn.  But, how do we know which is the path of least resistance for us? How often do we confidently feel that we are choosing the right way? 

Is the old children’s rhyme of selecting things, “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” as good as any other method of making choices?  Could that be considered using our intuition? 

As in the 1987 Steve Martin/John Candy movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, where they are going the wrong way on the highway, and are nearly smashed between two semi-trucks after ignoring another driver’s screaming, are we ever sure that we did not take the wrong turn? 

In our day to day slogging through life, we feel cut off from our higher minds most of the time. So, we don’t trust our feelings or don’t listen to them at all. I think our intuition tries to warn and guide us with subtle signs. Too subtle? How often do we just dismiss signs? 

If I had been listening to my bad feelings about an appointment with a new doctor earlier this week, I would have saved myself a lot of time, anxiety, and gas money. I even threw Tarot cards on the visit. 

The cards were not fond of the doctor meeting, either.  If you know the cards, you will understand. I got The Tower, the card with ten swords in back.  But, I had to go. I’d postponed twice and it took me weeks to get that appointment.

So, I went, figuring I had just developed agoraphobia from too much pandemic alone time, and was probably projecting that onto the cards. I shoulda trusted my instincts and the negative cards.

I left that office, and canceled every future visit they had set, and the procedures they had scheduled. It felt like an assembly line there, and as though they were bilking insurance companies with unnecessary and unrequested procedures. I even had prescriptions to pick up, my pharmacy texted me, which I not requested and the doctor’s office had neglected to mention.

Unfortunately for the doctor’s office they had requested a Yelp review from me even before I was out of the building. I am pretty sure they are now rethinking that automatic text that goes out to new patients about being sure to leave a review. 

I wonder if Alec Baldwin had a premonition that he should not make his western movie, Rust, or if he had felt some anxiety he ignored. If so, we know he wishes he had listened to his misgivings.  

I thought I was either being my usual procrastinating self, or avoiding shopping this weekend with the crowds, when, despite my list for Costco, I decided to wait until a week day. 

Later in the day, I read on Citizen App that a couple had gone into my Costco with guns and robbed the warehouse of nine vacuums.  Nine vacuums. And their getaway car was a red Mercedes. 

First, I am glad I decided not to shop yesterday. Second, nine vacuums?  Third, a red getaway car? Isn’t that waving a red flag to cops?

I woke this morning to news about that horrific mass shooting in Monterey Park last night. People were celebrating the Chinese Water Rabbit New Year at a dance studio.  Ten dead. Twenty shot. The worst mass shooting since Uvalde, TX.  And in CA, where we have the strictest gun laws. How many of those victims had actually had second thoughts about going there or had warning signs to stay away that they ignored? 

In this world of gun toting crazies, should we all just stay home and not even worry about intuitive warnings? Maybe the news today is the warning. Beware at all times of who is around you and where you are going.  Don’t catch the eye of a stranger.  Don’t look like a victim.  Act tough.  And carry pepper spray and/or wear Kevlar. 

Maybe we all need to slow ourselves down, trust our instincts, and trust ourselves enough to avoid problems.  And how do we rise above our nervous minds and just see life, not as a personal obstacle course, but as simply and objectively just happening? And whether life is a drama or a comedy is up to our perspective, or our mood?

Can we learn to navigate the slings and arrows without taking it all so personally,  like life has it in for us, and maintain objectivity and humor? How do we keep our humor with tragedies like last night’s club shooting, or the massacre of 21, including 19 little kids and two teachers in Uvalde, or any of the mass shootings that are today so horrifyingly common place?

The theatre comedy/drama masks, Thalia and Melpomene respectively, could actually just symbolize the range of human emotions. They let us know that in life, sometimes we cry and sometimes we laugh. It’s just been so much more filled with tears than laughter in recent years. 

And I think that is why I have turned off the news more often lately and turned on old comedy movies. Only so much shit a girl can take. 

Norman Cousins had it right in his Anatomy of an Illness. He was told by his doctor that he would not survive ankylosing spondylitis, a painful collagen illness that rendered him immobile. He checked himself out of his hospital room and into a hotel room and watched movies that made him laugh until he had laughed himself well.  He restored his immune system with humor.

I don’t know the answers. I just know this world is killing us because we take it to heart. I know no one gets out alive, anyway. But, maybe we could enjoy our brief time in this insane world more if we just took ourselves less seriously, and paid attention to our higher selves or intuition.

As the Beatles sang in Within You Without You: “When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you see we're all one. And life flows on within you and without you.”  

So, carry on and try to see the absurdity of our ego created human situation. Cry or laugh through it, life just is, anyway. As Winston Churchill said, “Just keep buggering on.”

Maybe if we reminded ourselves by daily singing one of my favorite songs, Eric Idle’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, we could shirk off even the worst life has to offer. As Eric sings:  “If life seems jolly rotten, there’s something you’ve forgotten, and that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing. When you’re feeing in the dumps, don’t be silly chumps.  Just purse your lips and whistle - that’s the thing.” 

Jacosa Puella

January 22, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M

Deprogramming to Bridge the Divide

 

        Have you ever felt surrounded, out-gunned, and overwhelmed by the loud insanity yelling over you constantly online, and think your head might explode? Have you ever wanted to just shut the world out, singing loudly, Lalalalalala with your fingers in your ears?

        You are not alone, despite pandemic isolation making you wonder.

Life has not felt normal for about seven years now.  Thank you, Trump, MAGA, QAnon, KKK, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, militiamen, white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, and just plain old GOP, the most dangerous organization in US, etc.  

Our pandemic isolation, that has caused a lot of psychological and financial woes, could have been cut far shorter, with fewer deaths, and businesses and schools remaining open, if we hadn’t had such an influx of misinformation, disinformation, and crazy conspiracies. And thank you, anti-vaxxers, for bringing back polio, too, BTW.  Gee. We missed it.

And now there is a new COVID variant for this winter, due to its mutating, also thanks to anti-vaxxers. We owe them so much. Dogs have to have all their shots before they can get together with other dogs.  But, you can’t even explain that to that anti-information group.

I’ve read and heard a lot of the disinformation was Russian propaganda.  Nothing Putin would rather see than US citizens dead from a virus, and/or at war with itself, to divide and conquer US.  Putin has been spreading disinformation and fomenting division and violence in US, at least since the orange con man formally launched his campaign, June 16, 2015 on that escalator with his paid audience. 

I want to blame the Trumpers for buying into the lies and conspiracies, and spreading them along with all their prejudices and hatred. Trump gave conspiracy cockroaches permission to come out of the woodwork and wreak their havoc.

It’s worse right now, of course, because it’s that voting time again.  So much more propaganda and so many more lies are swirling about US in election season. So many loud and obnoxiously opinionated and ignorant folks are feeling their oats. And, too, again, there are probably a lot who are Russian bots.  

The wrong-headed stuff I’ve been reading and hearing lately are staggering.  They are projecting Trump’s worst attributes onto Biden. There is so much hatred of Biden online.  None of the things that they accuse him of are true. But, they are true of Trump. Trump is the pedophile, sexual predator, con man criminal, and traitor the misinformed MAGA crowd says Biden is.

And you can’t make sense to any of the purveyors of this garbage. They yell over you.  Republicans and Democrats used to be able to debate and argue in Congress, and go out for a beer after. The good old days. Now Dems need to wear Kevlar jackets to Congress. 

And Republicans continue on the smear campaigns. The Neanderthal blonde with the voice of a Velociprator in Congress, told the orange con man’s mob at his last rally the other day that Democrats are killing Republicans. She lied and made up stories and they believed her.  She was stirring up more violent insurrections.  How is that legal? Free speech does not covering yelling fire in a theater. It should not cover trying to start a violent overthrow of the government.

Is MTG now just MT with the impending divorce?  As Stephanie Miller said on her radio show when she heard about the divorce, “Her husband wants a Greene New Deal.” MT is a Q crazy and Q is eating her and all their brains. 

They accuse Dems of drinking babies’ blood.  I mean, really? Remember the pizza parlor in DC, with the basement where supposedly Hillary Clinton was sex trafficking children? Remember the man who took a gun into that pizza parlor to shoot them? The pizza parlor has no basement. Innocents out for pizza that night could have been killed due to these lunatics.  How do deal with the gullible? Again, you can’t talk to them.

And sadly, I am related to some, not Q, but Evangelicals who think Biden is Satan and Trump is the second coming.  I got tired of hitting a brick wall with them and being accused of only reading “fake news.” The more I reasoned and gave them facts and stats, the more I heard I was fake news.  

So, I decided to read an article on deprogramming the brainwashed.  Turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong all along. I was creating an armed camp on the other side by disagreeing with them and trying to get them facts.

The article said we should pretend to understand and even be on their side. Get on their good side, so to speak. Contradicting and arguing with brainwashed subjects is spitting in the wind.  One must get their trust, not get their hackles up.  I’m not good at this.

But, after nearly losing family members and friends, (Well, I did lose a few along the way.), I decided to try the professionals’ advice.  Get their confidence by agreeing with little things.  And when you get them to let down some of their defenses, ask questions about stuff they believe. Using the Socratic method.

But, you need to ask questions in a way that does not sound like you are putting them down or belittling their beliefs.  Not as easy as it sounds.  Because when I hear or read the things they believe, I have to breathe deeply, and try to see things from their POV as to why they have accepted such outlandish ideas.

Sometimes they have some stuff right.  Sometimes I have some stuff wrong. So, I figure I can start there and let them correct things I say and say, oh, I didn’t know that, or concede a point or two.  Take them off guard and then ask them questions that may make them question what they have accepted as true.  Then if you can get a little trust, gently throw in a few facts that they can check.

Maybe ask them questions that make them see why the other side is saying what they are saying, as in who is to gain from that?  For instance, I have relatives who really believe Biden is corrupt and his family is a crime family.  They think Trump is just misunderstood and has been attacked forever.

Where do you start with that? I used to give them titles and authors of books to read. They didn’t read them.  They just said the authors were anti-Trump or they had Trump derangement syndrome.  They tell me I have Trump derangement syndrome. 

Gotta hand it to that con man. He’s good. They really believe his victimhood stories.  They are the ones with  Trump derangement syndrome, and it goes deep.

So, how does one get through that wall of brainwashing? Not easily.  I’m a work in progress.  I only read one article on deprogramming so far. And I’ve only begun work on one relative.  But, I am hoping that I am learning that my tactics were not working at all, and I’m hoping that by adapting my tactics, language, behavior, etc., I can affect a change in their thinking.

I’ll keep you posted.  This could take a century or two.  The misinformation and disinformation is very ingrained.  Between the pervasive Russian propaganda going around social media, and the grifter in chief having gotten so many people’s confidence, and still being allowed to hold rallies where he continues his big lies, and so many Republicans willing to repeat the lies to win elections with his ignorant base, it is a Sisyphean task.  

I’ve never seen the nation so divided as it is now since the country was taken over by probably the best con man America has ever seen.  There’s a new book out by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Divider, Trump in the White House 2017 - 2021. I haven’t read it, yet.  I have lived it, though.  Those years left me, and so many of us, with such angst and dismay about how far we have fallen, fearing for the future of democracy.  

I should probably also read the book, Talking Across the Divide, How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Change the World, by Justin Lee.  Maybe that should be my next non-fiction book in my deprogramming education.  

We saw the culmination of the divide and the lies on January 6, 2021, and the committee hearings are still going on.  But, many of us fear that that insurrection was not the culmination, but rather a dress rehearsal for those who would overthrow our government and install a fascist dictator.  Fingers crossed.

Jacosa Puella

October 3, 2022

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