“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
And to think that Stevenson lived in the 19th century, not the 21st. I have long maintained that mindfulness practice is a necessary antidote to the digital age’s unabated assault on our attention and ability to focus.
How can Republicans possibly offer such uniformly low-grade, corrupt and often ignorant candidates for the highest office in the nation?
Because they have developed a corporate media propaganda echo chamber/fog machine so high-grade that it’s capable of conning any number of citizens into believing that black is white, government is evil, invasion is liberation, poverty is freedom, health care is luxury, stupid is smart and contemptible is heroic.
If you have sufficient propaganda power over the news media, you can launch and sustain just about any horror. You can, for example, demonize an unarmed boy who had committed no crime, and make a champion of the man who stalked and killed him.
The human species is capable of both discovering wisdom, and of ignoring it. We’re busy with the latter right now in the U.S.
“We sneer at experts,” observed David DeWitt. “We spit epithets like ‘academic elites’ at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams.
“We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We worship spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence. We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.”
“It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.”
Michael Bell wrote, “With the accumulated knowledge of all history at our fingertips, willful ignorance still wins the day.”
“Anti-democratic forces benefit from ‘post-truth politics’ because in the absence of truth, truth is defined by power,” as Chrissy Stroop observed.
And that’s why accepting lies as facts is a snake pit out of which all other evils crawl.
In America, the word “freedom” rings out like gunfire.
“Today we hear it used to shout down and bully school boards during their public meetings,” noted Bob Minor. “Nurses, school teachers, flight attendants and people just walking down the street have heard it used by people while the shouter assaults them.
“Freedom” has become a meaningless moron word, having “…attained a status so undefined, so empty of a definition by those who constantly hide behind their invocation of the term, so lacking in thought about what it could mean, that it seems to be an excuse to do whatever one wants and to hell with those others affected by whatever it is someone wants to do."
As one wise wit once said, “The absolute funniest art of capitalist ideology is that they somehow managed to convince everyone that ‘freedom’ meant the freedom to choose between 63 kinds of shampoo, and not the freedom to quit a job you hate without losing your health insurance.”
The sad truth is beyond their rhetoric, a lot of Americans have never been comfortable with real constitutional liberty. They find the winds of freedom frightening, not bracing. They’d really prefer to smooch some strongman dictator’s bottom and just CALL that “freedom.”
“Freedom, among the base of Trump’s Republican Party, means license to do whatever you feel like on impulse — too bad about the cop you concussed on Jan. 6th, or the elderly woman deathly ill from COVID because you refused to wear a mask, or the election worker now in hiding because of your death threat,” Mike Lofgren wrote. “This kind of freedom is the freedom of the Freudian id, bursting out of its civilized constraints like the alien creature in John Carpenter's The Thing.”
What Republicans MEAN by “freedom” is they want perfect freedom for themselves (including the freedom to commit crimes) and they want you clubbed over the head by cops or the military the moment you say or do anything they don’t like.
Republicans love to shout “freedom!” while silencing everyone else in sight.
A hare fled terrified from the noise of fruit falling from a tree, convinced that it was the end of the world. Other animals — including deer, buffalo, elephants and tigers — asked him the reason for his fear and joined him in his flight, until a great host of animals were running for their lives.
A lion, who was in fact the future Buddha, realized that the animals risked death if they continued to rush headlong toward the sea. He halted their flight with a mighty roar and questioned each animal in turn, finally coming to the timid hare. The lion realized what must have occurred and took the hare back to the tree, where he made certain that the noise had indeed been caused by a falling fruit. The other animals were reassured and calm returned.
— The Daddabha Jataka
Ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) is a Japanese idiom that means “once in a lifetime,” “for this time only,” or “one chance in a lifetime.” It's a cultural concept that encourages people to appreciate the unique nature of each moment and to enjoy it fully before it passes.
The phrase originated in the 16th century during Japanese tea ceremonies, where participants would meet to have tea knowing that the exact ceremony would never happen again. The term is made up of two words: ichigo, which means “one’s lifetime,” and ichie, which means “experiencing something just once.”
The concept of ichi-go ichi-e suggest that you:
Be open to new people
Say yes to spontaneous invitations
Be present with loved ones and friends
Allow all emotions to flow
Look forward to the next encounter with curiosity.
(Copy and art created with the assistance of AI)
