Predicting The Present In America

(Notes from a Non-Participant in The Front Lines of Ignorance)

Introduction

I didn’t actually learn about the events of 9/11 till nearly three months after the event. Through a combination of circumstances of both accident and design I found myself with an opportunity to conduct an experiment—namely how to be a modern day ‘information’ Robinson Crusoe’ without an island, in fact in a rather large metropolitan city. All I knew was that something somewhere had happened and I decided under the urging of some perverse inner imp, to see how long I could maintain that virginity. I would eliminate radio and television, avoid the newspaper headlines in stores, wear earplugs in public and deliver stern warnings to friends to say nothing to me about ‘IT.’

I woke up slowly around noon on the day of ‘9/11’ and still lying in bed called the mail order Co. to see what had happened to something I had ordered more than two weeks ago. They put me on hold to check my order and had me listen to the broadcast of their choice. It happened to be news. Before I could protect my mind the searing image of something about terrorists and people jumping out of the windows of burning buildings was engraved into my memory. A sudden force of emotion rushed through me. I threw the phone down in rage and kept it at a fairly inaudible distance till the lady returned and I finished my business. Next, I called the phone Co. to check on my last bill and heard a recording saying that they were closed due to the National emergency. I resisted the impulse to turn on the radio or television.

My sudden rage was directed at a form of creeping terrorism that feels closer to home and is growing steadily. It has been gradually breaking through to me that something is very wrong with our lives, that they are suffocating, psychotic, and preposterous with priorities imposed from outside which are rushing at us in a swelling tide of unavoidable information. I have been feeling over stimulated for some time, either from the agendas of others masquerading as mine, or from the surplus of random misfortune that deserves my attention. There is a metastasized tumor of ‘attention deficit disorder,’ from having too much to attend to and it creates a kind of static interference that limits my ability to focus my feelings. I have trouble even taking in ‘information,’ of simply assigning meaning to information which is continually competing to reshape the territory of my perceptions with its own, thus threatening the very borders of the self, obscuring my ability to even recognize what is my own experience.

What 30 years ago were small unnoticed erosions into my sense of control over my life has turned into an avalanche. I only have to be on the freeway of any modern city or stand in the middle of any shopping mall to feel the shifting of those internal tectonic plates that stabilize the sandcastle of the personality, to feel that fragile sense of ownership at the center of myself either overwhelmed and swept away by the massive undertow of so many other urgent, rushing lives, or simply lost in an exploding world whose numbing numbers have become a brutal arena of billions of competing agendas.

Our challenge is becoming how to take our life and what happens in it seriously, how to value our own joy and pain which can be lost or disfigured by outside interference and either dwarfed or surpassed through merely looking in any direction or picking up any newspaper. How do we dare to assign real importance to our emotional lives? Perhaps mainly by insisting and by knowing that not valuing your own experience devalues everyone’s.

Central to that is a need to preserve the source of originality in ourselves, the continual struggle to identify and claim our own individual experience and still remain social beings, members of a class, race, and country.

I felt a sharp desire to be clearer about my perceptions and experiences, to explore the Co. of the ‘self’ from any angle that was available, to find out if I was the major stockholder, to wrestle back ownership of that precious place we call consciousness. Exactly where was this ‘I’ located and what were its dimensions? Just what is the circumference of ‘self’ and what are its boundaries and how far do they extend? Could they be made to extend? And who says?

I did not know who had committed the act or what the act was, or what their motivations were for doing it, but it suddenly seemed to me that they had released something that had been silently residing and growing both within me and the world, a loud scream of frustration, anger, and rage, that had finally become articulated into visible tragedy.

The first uncensored feeling to rise up in me was, ‘Maybe, at last, everyone’s in the
same boat. Maybe we can finally get America’s attention off the ‘business as usual’ stock market (that Frankenstein creation which doesn’t cope with ‘uncertainty’ any better than its creator) and onto human agendas? Maybe a thunder and lightening voice has parted the clouds and yelled down angrily, “nobody needs health insurance, all they need is health care”!

To live without adequate income is to exist in a continual running emergency but the competing messages from our culture are, 'I do not see nor want to see it' or 'I see it but it is not relevant to our social agenda.' It is sickening and obscene at election after election watching us turn our backs with cynical and callous indifference toward the endless combinations of 'have nots' in this country, to watch those 'unfortunate' women and men and children who have failed the 'self reliance' test pushing their shopping cart houses through the public and the private sectors without raising a decibel of protest or public outrage from the human sector, a sick picture of emergency and indifference, urgency and silence.

The world is not round but flat. People fall off the edge of it every hour of every day.
In fact, one of our most astonishing acts is the casualness with which we let anyone we love or need out of our line of sight, as though death would not prevent us from reaching them with a person to person call in case of an emergency, a new feature of our cell phone service. We are always standing on a trap door and there’s a timer on it and we don’t know what it’s set for. Isn’t that more than enough to handle?

It is becoming harder and harder to ask ‘for whom the bell tolls’ when it’s become a continuous tolling message of grief and misery that never stops. Now this tireless messenger from evening news-anchors who usually have the emotional presence of a disinterested third party, want to bring me another message of pain and grief, another version of Cortez and his un-merry men slaughtering more Aztecs and a place in me just wants to scream, ‘God Damn it, Enough.! Stop it, stop it,!’-Our God sheds the blood of his Son and -the Aztecs shed the blood of their citizens to their God and we have more or less followed suit ever since. Why not read something, why not think!

While I was lying there wrestling with curiosity and the urge to turn on the TV and contend with the spin cycle of emotions I knew that would generate I found myself suddenly interested in the space I was occupying, its feeling. It began to feel like the vitality of my awareness was being enhanced or sharpened in some way, imagination given access to new possibilities, a cocoon containing a kind of infinite permission that had formerly been hidden. There was a kind of giddy lightness in this novel ignorance, an almost illicit sweetness that seemed to carry within it new aspects of reality ordinarily denied to us.

I decided to continue my quarantine of ‘current events.’ What I didn’t know suddenly seemed as important as what I did know, just as negative numbers have a function in math. It felt as though I had discovered a secret form of occult happiness that hovered in those dim borders at the far edge of imagination’s yearning, teasing me like a ghost wind. I began to feel like a spy in reverse, carrying an important secret without content.

On the third day, while I was taking my daily walk, someone stopped me in his car for directions, asking me if he was heading west. It surprised me somewhat when I had to tell him that I didn’t know. After he drove off, it occurred to me that the only west I knew was what was west of me, where my west was, and as I turned, so did it. I felt suddenly thrilled that the universe had placed a private little subversion inside of me, my own unique unnatural center in the natural order of things.

I began to see how tissue thin the mind’s autonomy really is: how often we were pushed, pulled, and directed by remote control, reducing the intellectual freedom over many parts of our lives to that of a Wells Fargo security guard, a plastic, inflatable, all purpose human being. Our mind is continuously being subtly raped, involuntarily violated, seeded by other people’s thoughts, ideas, events, music, or random conversations. I remembered back to my childhood years as a church acolyte when they told me things about a God and a Jesus I could not know they could not know. What a rare and precious thing it is, and how hard won, just to know ‘what happened when you left your room and how it really felt.’

The powerful pressures which surround us, both intentionally and unintentionally, tell us which way to go and what to do when we get there. They would rather ‘your’ life not be the focus of your life. They want you to substitute appropriate response for authentic response, to get on with your life’ by leaving it behind, to simply fit into the world as it is, like a carrot or head of lettuce or a chair.
The fact that we share a common language can lead us to the easy misconception that we share identical experience but we all have our own private map of what makes us feel sad or happy, nervous or relaxed, excited or bored, along with our own private ‘treasure chest’ of fantasies. They are our ‘true north’ and if we lose touch with them it is not a small loss which is why one’s authentic experience is so crucial and often so threatening to others and why the continual struggle to be the author of our own experience is so vital. ‘Author’ means authority, authorizing your own response to your own experience, becoming your own Pope, Judge, Mailman, News-anchor, and President.

For example, I have been patiently waiting through the interminable dreariness of sports to see one real miracle, just once. I wasn’t waiting for the last place team to upset the first place one, the weak hitter to hit the home run with bases loaded, I was waiting for that player who would suddenly turn with the ball in his hand and put it in the opponent’s basket, someone who would say, ‘what the hell we’re forty points ahead,” or just “why not!” I went through the library’s entire history of sports journals, newspapers, and biographies, even Ripley’s ‘Believe it Or Not’ and there wasn’t a mention of anything even remotely suggestive of such a miracle.
I haven’t seen this miracle for the same reason you don’t see people in the bowling alley trying to leave as many pins standing as possible. In many ways it would be a more challenging game, requiring more refined dexterity, but they aren’t aware that tradition and unconscious competition have programmed them. It’s literally ‘unthinkable’ not to compete, partly because you never feel the chain collar around your neck till you move away from the stake and you won’t move away from it because ‘the most skillful manipulation always appears as choice to those who are targeted.’ The only way you’re taught to play the game is to win or lose. No wayward, spontaneous, playful impulse ever whispers in your soul’s ear.

Still, there is no future in giving up so I’m still waiting patiently for the miracle and as long as imagination is part of us, there is hope, because that’s its job. The imagination is always running a concurrent, alternate history to what is going on around it, like that girl who lived up in a tree to protest logging. The best part of us is often up in a tree somewhere refusing to come down.

I established a fairly easy routine of being able to avoid exposure to anything relating to
‘it’ and went about my way with less vigilance but I couldn’t help noticing the flood of American flags that suddenly appeared almost everywhere and seemed to carry a feeling of ‘congratulations’ issuing from an inner circle of easy membership. Yet they also seemed to be masking a deeper public display of a social ‘white cell’ syndrome, our mind’s social antibody finally sanctioned, released and amplified, under the auspices of unanimous approval.

I saw a red convertible pull up along a sidewalk flying a large American flag like an erection. Two young men safe in their prime years jumped out and onto the street. They got out wearing tee shirts that said in large bold letters, “Solidarity against Terrorism,” as if in answer to others somewhere who were wearing tee-shirts saying, “Solidarity for Terrorism or Gang Rape.” I sensed that a terrifyingly complex human tragedy was being reduced to a cultural, communal, bumper sticker.

I have been wondering what America’s soul is about lately. Since this began I have found myself reflecting on my feelings about my country with a sharper focus than I had before. What did I really feel about living in America?- because, in the last analysis, we don’t think, we feel. It’s the only radar or compass that can give us our most vital bearings.

I was born and raised in America and have never been outside it, even during my four years in the Air Force so I have no basis for comparison but I can still respond to the environment I live in. While I like its material comforts that my deeper response to it has been largely one of distaste. It has felt like the bully on the playground who, for the most part, was lacks any real sympathetic regard or sensitivity for anything outside its primary functions of business, profit, competition, conformity and its stern, judgmental God. America has always really felt like a big football game to me, with harsh referees, an intimidating, suffocating super bowl that only has room for winners and losers.

I realized I’ve never felt proud or possessive about my country, that I do not live in a ‘Country’ I want to be mine, but in a fiercely competitive urban landscape that generates tension, conflict, and anxiety as efficiently as if it had been designed for it. America is a ‘business warrior.’ It is in a hurry and its power is real and thoughtless and frightening. Its response to those who can’t keep up is the small, inconspicuous plastic containers for donations at supermarket checkout counters. The inadequate always seems to be sufficient here.

I can only draw conclusions about a ‘Country’ from the actions and messages of its institutions and leaders A week before ‘9/11’ I watched a national evening ‘news-anchor’ report that there were ‘6000 homeless teenagers in Seattle’ without changing his expression. Children are continuously absorbing messages from the world around them and one doesn’t have to look very far to see that the strongest messages coming at them are deeply disturbing: Three times as many children are committing suicide now as compared to thirty years ago. They see people living in shopping carts and tents, executions challenging football as the national pastime and only competing for our attention with the race to seduce and manipulate consumers, or build more and bigger prisons.

These children see a medical system that is not organized to simply deliver health care, but rather a confused nervous system that can’t decide if it wants to check the blood pressure in bed 5 or the day’s receipts. This is the fact and the evidence, what America wants them to swear allegiance to!? wants God to ‘Bless – an America that is handed back and forth between family dynasties, from ‘Roosevelt’s’ to ‘Kennedy’s’ to the ‘Bush’s’ like it was some kind of ‘Bonanza’ ranch that Ben Cartwright was going to pass on to ‘Hoss’ and then ‘Little Joe;’ an America where elections are sudden death business transactions, business ‘Gunfights at an O.K. Corral,’ It is not Okay.

I recently organized an event for children who were reading poetry that they had written, and a nine year old boy named Wes Bently read his two line poem, ‘The Empire,’
‘Ask the repetitive Empire for food.
It will answer “no.”
What had really happened on 9/11? Literally not knowing I decided to compound my ignorance by hazarding a guess. The famous attorney Clarence Darrow said his job was to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Well, apparently the comfortable have been afflicted. We have been attacked I presumed by some members from a neighboring tribe, whose serious God did not like our serious God partially because out God was richer, stronger, and more powerful. Someone said accurately that, “we can only be as savage as we are absolutely serious.”


As I walked about I saw flags flowing in profusion decorating sorrow’s random parade of anger and fear. The anger and fear are not new but now they have taken shape like a newly formed team with bright uniforms that has just found a worthy and needed challenge. But all this begs the question- Was everything OK the day before this happened? Where was our attention directed the day before, besides Wall Street? What was our anger directed to, besides the few remaining ‘Welfare’ recipients?

The headlines say, ‘America Attacked,’ and flags are flown at half mast for those who perished, as they should be. Still, I find it necessary to separate people who die in any country from that country, to eliminate connections that are not deeply central to the powerful event of death, or at least make them peripheral. A songwriter recently wrote, “someone’s dying in Canada, and the leaves are drenched with rain.” What is important is the dying and its echo of leaves drenched in rain’ not the accidents of geography. Shouldn’t flags everywhere be flown at half mast everyday for those everywhere who perish from less overtly violent, less deliberate, acts of commission or omission that range from exposure, homelessness, malnutrition and hunger, uncovered illness, to the infinite, invisible effects of poverty, which are an undeniable product of our ‘Democracy in action.’

I happened to learn later that the President said, “You are either for us or against us.”
The President needs a lens adjustment. If, between wars, any young soldier were to go to a nearby phone booth and call this Veterans Dept. and inquire if he and his ‘sacred’ family would be guaranteed health care in the future, following his service years, he would be told ‘No, it’s not part of the plan.’ The soldier is really just defending a large corporation that doesn’t offer benefits.

Such a country with its obsessive ‘narcissus’ anthem chanting ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose the greatest nation of them all’ is not really a homeland at all, it is just another land mass where those without stock options or adequate income are trying to survive amid flag waving that is the political equivalent of the hula-hoop. To ask only ‘what you can do for your country’ and not what it does for its citizens is an idiots quiz.

My deep feelings about any country with such a ‘plan,’ a country that wants it citizens to serve it but refuses to serve them is anger, as it would be in any uncaring abusive relationship. Unfortunately ‘anger’ has become suspect in our ‘therapy’age. There is much counseling on how to dampen anger, how to disarm it, detour it, ignore it, talk it away, reason it away, educate it away, meditate it away, pray it away, love it away, and gene-therapy it away, anything but how to listen to it.

And terrorism, where does it live? Terror arises when we are exposed to either subtle or stark threats to vital areas of our well being we can’t respond to adequately or prevent,
the mind and body’s absence of shelter and privacy, repeated frustration or blocked access to needed health care. It is not only what happens to us but what seems likely to happen. - the recurring cancer of worry around problems without solution,’--- “ I can’t pay the rent,” “The letter says they’re going to shut the heat and water off,” “They said we aren’t covered,” “Regret to inform you that you don’t qualify,”... Are not all the mental and emotional states of pressure, stress, and hopelessness which those conditions produce a drip torture form of terror?!

Then what about ‘rage?’ Can’t most rage be ultimately traced back to a deep sense of powerlessness, loss, or humiliation in some form or another, of having eaten Alice’s mushroom that makes one smaller. Anger, violence, rage -- aren’t they all loud, searing messages of pain or wounds that have gone unacknowledged, damaged lives that have not been seen or cared about? Violence is nearly always a response to an intolerable situation, to love that has been denied in some material or spiritual form. While violence and rage and anger is not the face of love that we have been taught to recognize, it is, nevertheless, love speaking, loudly, from its other face of profound, intolerable disappointment.