"We have become a nation of pansies"

We are not a nation of pansies.


We are a nation of workers and professionals. Every day of labor is a day of dignity, a day where we shape and contribute to our world.

We are a nation of the just. Living up to the letter of the law, and breaking that law if it is unjust.

We are a nation of communities and the communal. Enriching our shared lives, and always risking reaching out to a new neighbor or the stranger.

We are a nation of progress and change. Refusing to let the dark, suffocating, blood soaked history of humanity define us now or in the future.

I was going to refute your points one by one, but they are ridiculous. I cannot take seriously someone who thinks America is broken because we refuse to be exactly who you want us to be.

America isn't broken for changing or making progress; it is always broken and whole at the same time.

We are broken for having replaced family-time with screen time, but made whole using those screens to share love over long distances.

We are broken for loosing our ancestral beliefs about gender identity, but made whole because a part of the human race is recognized and respected for the first time in our entire history.

We are broken because we live in subdivisions and shop at mini-malls, but made whole by wealth and health unimaginable to our ancestors.

America is whole and broken. Change is dangerous, destructive, redemptive, fulfilling, shocking. Change is inescapable, and anyone trying to ask "who are we essentially?" will find no answer.  The body politic, like the body, is injured and healed, injured and healed, but unlike the body, gets stronger and stronger after being broken apart.

We have never been the land of faithfulness, or sacredness, or sameness, or boringness. We are the nation of progress, we are not pansies, we will not stop, and you should be ready.

"... and go to the grave with the song still in them"

On her desk was a recently disheveled pile of papers with an arm and grey hair across them. Over creamed coffee was slowly pooling in a corner, and, as hours passed, brown seeped into the edges of subpoenas and tax returns.

Grey morning light gradually pushed through the windows and roused the night watch from an unwatchful night of sleep.

Coffee seeped into the padded cubical wall, mingling with her accumulated human smells and oils, the product of years. Her well rounded (and quite round) children smiled at her unceasingly from a forgettable childhood photograph, which they had quickly forgotten, to become the suited specters of the present. Photos of all kinds pinned to the wall, the more tangible the more irretrievably past. A vase of paper flowers, in eternal pastels, stood next to the yellowing monitor. On a calender was an image of a Hawaiian beach, she'd been once, hung over an empty waist high book shelf.

Her last scream had not been quite loud enough to disturb the guard's dreams. Had he heard, they might have been, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation..."

[note: add solution. add emotional desperation born of not facing/challenging]

Habitual Reflexivity and Approachong the Good Life

One project that most fascinates me is the project of living 'the good life.' The good life is where value, as discerned through philosophical investigation, is in some way respected or achieved. What exactly moral value is, and what should be done about it, is hotly debated, so I will assume the good life is where sustainable happiness (perfectly or closely) is achieved and a consistent ethics is in use when relating to other beings or things with moral value. I am most concerned with figuring out how to live to facilitate the sustainable happiness part of the equation of the good life.

In figuring out how to live we need reflexivity; that quality of mind, perhaps unique to humans, where we can analyze our thoughts from a higher level (a meta level, or a meta-meta level, or a meta-meta-macro level!), which is honestly pretty nifty. Theoretically, if we are engaged towards a goal, self-reflexivity gives us the power to modify and correct our approach to that goal if that approach isn't efficient. This quality/habit/skill needs to be nurtured in order to efficiently achieve the good life, and auto-correct if out approach is not efficient.

It seems to me that the best self-analysis happens as a result of synthesis. It's a lot of work to investigate the nature of reality yourself (the process of collecting the raw data for synthesis), not to mention this work has been done in many countless variations across history by people employing diverse methods.  So for the sake of efficiency we must seek out and collect data relevant to our goals in places where they are most dense and useful. Thus, reading and researching are moral goods.

Ok, well, maybe not moral goods, that's probably a bit too tempting of a claim on my part, but it's certainly a good idea. After this you need the two further components of energy and honesty. Honesty is necessary because if the process of synthesis is always sabotaged by sentimentality or attachment there is no point in it. What is most lacking in most people, organizations, and myself is energy, which is the fuel to implement good ideas and see them through. My biggest challenge at the moment is using the structure above to develop the mental mechanisms necessary to achieve sufficient energy to implement and try out the ideas arising from reasoned reflection (my ideas are forming a serious backlog by now). Choose your aims carefully and then be attached to them, not the numerous distractions impeding your progress.

Assigning Value Rationally

Many apologies to Ancient Greeks and Christians, but the physical world has no order that pertains to living the good life, and humans are rare beings who delight in order living on the fringes of near universal chaos. We briefly exist, and this existence is chiefly comprised of encoded moleculecular chains constructing a machine and the machine organizes it's environment to suit the specifications of the machine.

There is no palliative for this crushing truth that in terms of the material universe we are worthless machines, as disposable as any other thing existing. A strange equality arises from that. Why do the rich get more if they're not more valuable? Why do the powerful have power?

Valuation is an inescapable part of being human, barring the perfectly enlightened of course, and as such we have many flimsy excuses for inequality. Essentially excuses to allow the machine around us, our community and society, to act out the irrational impulses of people who value. And we are all irrational.

The trick for the equal democratic society is to minimize those flimsy excuses that make the machine inequitable. We've attempted to vanquish religion as a justification, now let's eliminate the claim that the rich are better than the rest. That they've 'worked harder' is a common American saying. If they have worked harder they equally happened upon the ability to work hard, in the same way a person who is lazy has happened upon the circumstances that make him lazy.

Reward hard work because that's what makes the capitalist machine move, but don't let it become a justification for daylight robbery. We create value - value doesn't exist without valuer - and as such let's value what is conducive to human happiness and not what is conducive to suffering.

Experience resides in memory, while memory is an unlocatable ghost 'experience' seems to speak of something like an essence. Something must be there. As if the accumulation of memory is meaningful if that accumulated memory is experience, and the meaningful essence of experience will justify the attachment to memory.

What do we have? The clothes on our back? The back on our spines? Our consciousness on our brains, which is moving about and acting through an alien body? Do we even have our consciousness?

We don't properly own anything, and if we can't locate the self in any satisfactory manner, the self is then most likely an evolved construct, purposed to motivate us to care properly. If we care properly about ourselves we won't just let our bodies or our material assets parish. Reasonable, one might say.

But then the eternal question: why do I care so much? With my clothes and my back and my spine and my brain and my restless restless mind?

So is experience isn't ours; it's lack of self grates against our illusory sense of self which is only a concept that we allow to be.

Why care so much when it hurts?

There is and always has been a certain amount of alienation between government and the governed. That is the very nature of government; the alienation of those who have direct access to the mechanisms of power to those who have indirect access or no access at all. The conservative, liberal, and even the socialist response would be that such a separation is inevitable. The conservative would say it is a good and right separation, the liberal would say we can live with the separation as it is now, and the socialist would say that such a disparity should be reduced and eliminated when possible but ultimately there will always be some distance.

The socialist position is by far the most sympathetic. The vision of the left is that of communities and individuals reclaiming their own sovereignty and reappropriating their own resources so those resources aren't used against their or other sovereign people's interests.

Modern liberal democracy is as close as we have gotten to a left vision of the world where this central disparity is reduced. The people are not nearly as distanced from the means of power as they have been in the past and it has meant huge material gains. However, people are still fundamentally alienated from governance, and lately that real and mental distance has grown in the United States in elsewhere. It's an open secret in the US there is hardly anything left of a representative republic; the people's voices are routinely sidelined through the influence of the economically powerful and those that are in government to represent the people are part of this powerful class or closely aligned with it.

More than ever in history the common ideal of the left to reclaim governance for the people is relevant and pressingly obvious as the solution to the ongoing crisis of political legitimacy. What is the road map for a left in the United States that wont be subsumed into the capitalist Democratic party?  

Life comes apart very visibly toward the end. There are so many little cycles of birth and death; the death of a town is one.

You likely didn't see your town come to life some summer of capital years ago. Maybe it was the mills, making the earth hum with the urgency of constant production. Maybe it was a fortuitous location on the sea, with crushing hopeful crowds piling off boats to partake in the commerce of others who had similarly come ashore. Or maybe a new route between the places of commerce and production had bought the lives of commerce and production to the wild.

You probably are seeing some community's not-so-august fall, with the humming machines silent, the crowds cynical, and the routes between places empty of trade. Frost came early to end summer, and the fall seeps into every yard and home.

Walking and riding the streets of the new ghost town are those spirits who are only vaguely aware they are dead. They are still flesh and blood, they still dream, and they still rear pale little children. 'What went wrong?' they say, 'Are we less daring? More selfish? Too caring?'

Did we do anything different at all? The world moved on without us, and we let it go.

So now, fellow spirits, we must be called back to life, or, more precisely, cry out we never stopped living. These, our streets, we once built and will build again. Our roofs we'll reroof. Our stores we'll stock. Our larders we will fill with the fruits of our own labor and our own land.

Ours together, we'll say,

because the world moved on without us,

because we forgot the world is ours,
and  it wont be taken again.

Never forget,

and enjoy the spring.