I Need Some Help …

My thoughts exactly. It’s a good cause, and I gave to the Red Cross, but sources say that +100,000 Iraqi’s have died since the “liberation”. I also heard a MSF doctor say that as many people die from HIV/AIDS every two weeks as died in the tsunami disaster. Are our hearts and minds only open to dramatic disasters?

Yeah, I think so .. it’s one of the ways we feel we can participate in the soap opera called “news” …

Tsunami victims are safer .. there’s no responsible power to be afraid of confronting, I guess.

The years from 40 to 50 (in age) have been terrible for me, in terms of my disillusionment with the human race (not individuals per se) but all the people who swallow so much of the crap from the potentates.

I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and bent on success before that - which require performing for and looking good and pleasing the higher-ups and the clients who themselves were trying to please their higher-ups.

The thing that does most of our thinking relies entirely on exterior senses for its view of the world. The body politic once did a kind of braille reading, with rumor and gossip playing the part of tactile investigation, and the few eyewitness accounts available amplified by the grapevine. Now it’s broadcast/neural and fiercely centralized. So that people gossip and spread rumors about what they’re provided on TV, as news, current events, reality.

Also the same pathology that made Princess Di an icon of veneration and grief - it’s a combination of reflected idealized self-image and reflected desire, and that identification with everyman that makes the best stories so compelling. Innocence. The Iraqis are tainted, can never be innocent, they’re Arabs and Muslims. The souls of the providers can’t coexist in the same eternity let alone the same geographical area.

Short version:

Tsunami- innocent brown people plus white tourists.

Iraq- guilty brown people plus terrorists.

The important point is the impressions are generated in what used to be the human grapevine and is now a prosthetic feeding tube. An innoculation device. People care about what they’re told it’s all right to care about, with a little free time once in a while to spontaneously react to things like the birth of pandas in captivity.

Ajax, thanks for dropping in. I think that you’ve really zeroed in on a couple of important things that are helping most of us have a reasonably maladaptive response to these new conditions.

Your points

1… The body politic once did a kind of braille reading, with rumor and gossip playing the part of tactile investigation, and the few eyewitness accounts available amplified by the grapevine, and

2. The important point is the impressions are generated in what used to be the human grapevine and is now a prosthetic feeding tube.

have helped me put words to what I’ve glimpsed or understood but haven’t articulated in the same way - that many (most ?) people aren’t proactively curious about other cultures, what’s actually changing and happening in terms of being awake and progressive in today’s culture. I think Mcluhan would be both aghast (at CNN and Fox and MSNBC and the FCC) and fascinated (probably addicted to blogging in some form …

… but I believe you’re right when its predominantly consumers of what is fed to them at the end of a prosthetic tube.

There’s a guy named Jerry Michalski that said (at least i think it was him) our society now is full of consumers of entertainment and distraction who crap cash … that’s what a lot of it’s about …. cash.

Thank you for your thoughtful, complex and incisive comment. Thinking carefully about what you wrote has been a pleasurable moment in my day that expanded my perspective.

I don’t think there is a clear answer Jon.

I was speaking with a fireman I know. He spoke of climbing a ladder and seeing a woman screaming being burned alive. He was forced to make the decision to continue climbing. He was unable to get in there to get in there and get her because the roof was about to collapse. And it did. This situation is not analagous with Iraq. My point is, and this is what I asked him - how can you go on? How can you see that and not just turn away and throw up. He said, you are sick, but later.

Apart from the religious nuts and miltiary whakos and out and out revenge seeking racialists, I think with Iraq, there has been very much a ‘I don’t want to know…don’t show me’ attitude, a quite conscious turning away from the evil being perpetrated by America. Call it denial, blame consumerism, short attention spans and the media, our busy lives - the list goes on. But let’s face it - Evil has its grip on America. And I mean Evil.

I don’t think any of us really knows the cut-throat nature of naked power. We may have seen little glimpses of it. In ourselves especially. But do we know it, really…I don’t think so. If we did we would be in power.

But more than ever we are the powerless and the dismissed. And so where we can, we give. That we live in a world where we can still give to the victims in South East Asia is some sort of sustenance, some relief to my soul at least. That we can reach these people with a helping hand, that a dollar earned and handed over has some meaning, is something that can at least be done because, simply, the Americans are not in the way, in this the world of surrealpolitik.

There is a sincere belief held by most humans that the powerful are benificent.

And so turning

(cont’d) away from the suffering is our only alibi as potential witnesses and/or unindicted co-conspirators.

As the great head turner Sgt Shultz more than once said, “I know nothing.”

Yes … I agree with you, bmo. We humans want to shine, to care and give, where and how we can, and the power structure is arranged for the benefit of “them”

Weve all been blindsided at some point in our life. For some of us, life is a series of blind sided adventures! Maybe thats why when we see Tsunami victims our hearts go out to them.

Occupying Iraq has probably brought the price of oil down, and theres the complication of loyalty to troops. In fact, this complication means Operation Iraqui Freedom ( say what?) has resulted in more pent up desire to do nice things in the world.

Iraqis’ loss = tsunami victims’ gain.

Thanks, Joh for dropping by … I’m not quite sure I fully grasp what you mean by loyalty to troops resulting in a pent-up desire to do nice things … oh, wait, dumbo me … in other words we want to support our troops because they’re off engaged in doing the awful work of war, even if deep down we don’t agree probably with being at war, and so we displace or replace the desire to do good things for Iraqis with a rush to do good things elsewhere .. .tsunami victims ? Have I interpreted correctly?

What I was after was essentially not ‘we” being USians support for troops, but the fact that the rest of the world … Japan, germany, France, Canada, Norway, US … are all helping a lot in SE Asia … but I’m so surprised, still, I think .. that there hasn’t been more forceful push-back from the rest of the world against Bush et al, given that the US has invaded and occupied a foreign sovereign nation for as-yet unclear or invalid reasons and is now systematically murdering its citizens, whther direct intentional killing of guerilla fighters or all the rest of the inevitable collateral damage (otherwise known as women, children, the old and the infirm and 000’s of innocent people who rightly don’t want the US there.

Also … do you mean the rest of the world is less interested in relieving the Iraqi situation because the occupation of Iraq has lowered the price of oil ? Please help me with the reasoning here … I’d like to undertsand better.

Yep, this world lives by hypocrisy in order that it doesn’t face the ugly truth: WE LIVE IN THE JUNGLE!

THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

Once upon a time, in the deep jungle, lived a Lion and a Monkey… One day the Monkey, tired of the Lion always taking the LION’S SHARE, and seeing that such injustice represented a danger to all, demanded JUSTICE… The HUNGRY LION, yawning and stretching, said, “You would have to have paws and sharp teeth…” Then the Monkey, who was very clever, devised a plan: He would go to the costume store, and look like a lion…

When the Lion saw him, noticing that the new lion wasn’t a match for him, and fearing COMPETITION, killed him on the spot –before the indifferent look of the little animals of the jungle… And that’s how the Law of the Jungle was re-established one more time…

NOTE: Other monkeys survived him…

But when the monkeys starting blogging, 100 of them decide to go and surround and lay siege to the hungry Lion, and pester the shit out of him and so on and so on .. and then the hundredth monkey got all the other monkeys to …

Thanks for that fierce reminder of life here on Earth.

The US polices the oil producing regions and has a reputation for keeping the flow going. It’s a brutal, nasty cop but the leaders of the world’s biggest economies have a Hobbesian view and settle for doing business with the devil they can understand.

The encroaching giant of China could become the next superpower and usurp the poisition of the Western liberal capitalist democracies. If the US keeps a stranglehold on their oil, which they must have to industrialize, the threat to the multilateral hegemony is staved off for a while. If the cop wants to beat and kill people to make sure this happens, it’s regrettable but not too much.

Giving aid to people suffering from natural disasters is good for the leaders of liberal capitalist democracies. It allows them to show the warm hearts their citizens expect.

Nice synthesis, Harry .. short, sweet and to a key point.

You might even want to view the Rep/Dem contests as a Good Cop-Bad Cop routine. The good cop Dems come in with a cheeseburger while the bad cop Reps stand outside holding enema bags and cattle prods. You’re going to jail either way.

Well, sorry I can’t tell you that we can look forward to a better world, but that’s the way it is. And even more sorry for our kids that must be wondering why we don’t give a damn about them. Actually the lions are ready to put the whole world at risk so their lies and their position at the top of the food chain remains unchallenged.

The same attitude brought down the dinosaurs though…
EVOLVE OR ELSE!

Once upon a time lived a race of dinosaurs whose violence and appetite alarmed everybody… One day a Little Ant, tired of feeling stepped upon, and worried about her cooperative enterprise, came up to the Americanus Raptor–the biggest dinosaur of them all–and asked: “Why you eat and eat everything in your path? Why don’t you slim down? Why can’t we little animals at least have our own way?” Then the dinosaur, blowing the Little Ant away, shouted: “Bigger is better, so get lost!”

The Little Ant, then, gathered the whole cooperative and said: “Comrades, our world is being threatened by the dinosaurs, so…” And at that precise moment the Earth was hit by a big ball of fire, destroying all but the small animals…

Silent Tsunamis

‘In his speech to the World Economic Forum, Mr Chirac spoke movingly of the “silent tsunamis” of famine, disease and violence that regularly strike the developing world with a ferocity as devastating as the natural disaster that caused vast damage on the shores of the Indian Ocean.’

Wonderful words from Chirac. But the world is full of pretty words, and far, far less action. The Silent Tsunamis are silent because they rarely make the news among the non-issues of the day. Many red-herrings are used to keep people off the real issues like poverty, education, healthcare and the environment. Simply they are not a priority… We need something different though, just like the late agronomist Rene Dumont (also French) proposed, a world not based on (unequal) trade but in sustainable, cooperative development, good for the little fish. And yet Chirac’s ideas, as noble and gentle as they may be, are likely to go unheard by the predators of this world, for whom “education” is a bad word. They rather bet on Globalization or Law of the Jungle that makes some winners–and many losers. Too bad. And I’m afraid nothing but complete dismantling of the International Jungle–which forces ever growing military budgets–will do. We have to remind Chirac we must face the lions first…

“The charge against the current wave of democratization [in Africa] is not that it has failed to achieve idyllic political communities, but that, in more than a few cases, it has not performed its most basic function of protecting the ruled from the predations–and the conflicts–of rulers.” http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_3_66/ai_58118481

“We all have a hunt pending. All. Some, the few, catch their prey; others hardly see it; the majority only sees it pass or it lets it go. But whoever doesn’t catch his lion runs the risk of being devoured.” -Jorge Ramos, in the book ‘Hunting the Lion’