Serving the Idol of Ignorance

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.

Flying the Flapdoodle Flag of ‘Freedom’

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.

Panic and Perception: The Hare and the Fruit

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

For Once in My Life

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)

How a Poet Saw America

"We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many.

"We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. 

"All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."

— Mary Oliver

Rain on the Roof

Few sounds comfort with 

the rhythmic efficiency 

of rain on the roof.

The Answer is Attention

The more I consider it, the more I realize that attention, properly directed, is the solution to many of our difficulties. 

We tend to underrate the value of the simple act of attention, but I assure you that Madison Avenue and political propagandists do not.

After all, as the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”

And the poet Mary Oliver advised, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Merely momentarily shift your attention from your driving to your phone, for example, and a child may die. This isn’t a metaphor, but a memory. The driver was a teenage girl, and the child was an 8-year-old boy.