THE BORDERS OF OUR CURRENT LANDSCAPE

 “The secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom is courage.” Thucydides

I begin with Thucydides here as a friend graciously left the above quote on my desk this morning. Beginning with the knowledge we as human beings have been dealing with these kind of difficulties for a long time is a good starting point. Not only are we fortunate to know people who understand these fundamentals but we may also stand in the knowledge and faith they will always win in the end. Perhaps not until after long and desperate struggles but win they do.

“The gods will win. The devils will lose.”

Kundun a film by Martin Scorcese

Where will we find the ways we the people can stand together against those who seek to kill and harm us? It will be from taking a radically different perspective. We will not find this among the UberThink of those who either knowingly or unknowingly seek to betray themselves and us all. The joiners, the country club set, the middle manager types, those who engage in popular trends are already lost. 

Can you even imagine reading Rolling Stone Magazine, Vogue, the NYT, The Tennessean. The LA Times, The SF Chronicle -  any of these pulp fiction rags - for purposes other than to ridicule them? Ditto with any of the many participants in the TV, music, and mass entertainment bureaucracy? Mainstream “news”, mainstream “music”,  mainstream film, mainstream fashion? Imagine subjecting yourselves or anyone we care about to this sickening nonsense? 

Must we retreat into an opposite world, into a world of UnterThink? I’m certain there are better words than this but we must have some available. They steal our very language. Our very souls. We must reinvent them in the shadows of this. 

Remember Opposite Day from elementary school? Now we engage in a more sophisticated form. It will take many transformations. We must recognize each other, recognize each other’s dress, language, signals. We must invent, realize and inhabit a diametric opposite to the world proposed by the World Economic Forum, the insane rhetoric promoted by the Woke.

We know who we are. Whatever experiences radicalized us it no longer matters. The important thing is it did happen - shared experience. We have a tremendous store of shared experience and by sharing it we will formulate strategies for moving forward. Primary will be our intentions for doing so. Intentions will point to the methods, Only by staying faithful to the US Constitution as it was written - the intentions of it - and not necessarily to how it has been interpreted or to concessions which were made by past circumstances.

So what events radicalized our young minds? For me it may have been the State using Eminent Domain to take a beloved childhood home, or maybe the boy I went to school with from Kindergarten crippled by polio and whose Father was killed in the Korean war. 

Or maybe it was Eisenhower’s warning of the dangers within our government and the military industrial complex. Maybe it was rock n’ roll music and the blues. Maybe it was those first bloody political assassinations and their endless display on live TV. Maybe it was the Viet Nam war brought into our living rooms at dinner each night. Maybe it was our peers who were on the losing side of the lottery that sent us to Viet Nam. Maybe it was those who survived these perpetual wars to tell the tales. Maybe it was being there in Berkeley at People’s Park. Maybe it was Chicago. Maybe it was Oakland. Maybe it was the day a daughter was born with a heart defect. Maybe it was the moment I became a drummer. Maybe the day they came out with mRNA “vaccines.”

I’m becoming bored with my own list as these experiences get mired in all kinds of fog. The initial causes are many and they are shared. Remembering only serves a limited momentary purpose. 

But all these reasons combine into the day we know who and what to hold responsible and are finally able to do something positive. Initially these situations make us angry and yet if we stay with that anger we lose. It is in moving beyond anger to compassion, thought, language and action where we finally are able to deal with all these feelings in a successful way. Revolutions come and go but real ones may always be recognized as both occurring inside ourselves and without.

As we find it necessary to move underground it is useful to remember Thucydides who understood the fundamentals. If we are lost to unhappiness in ourselves we are unlikely to know freedom or understand what it is if we do. There is a big difference between freedom and license.  Ideally we have the courage to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with courage and understanding.

But it is with the power of knowing and understanding our history that we truly have an opportunity to get real. As many have pointed out those who do not know or understand their history will disappear into the mists of time. Fortunately those who are available to shed light on our history and the gains and losses it has awarded may have a chance to shape it anew.

Thucydides’ Legacy

It took several generations for Thucydides to attain his now-unassailed place as one of the greatest historians of all time. Aristotle, who lived a few decades later and wrote about the same era, never mentions him. By the first century B.C. writers such as Cicero declared him as a great historian. Over the next centuries, numerous copies were made of the work, ensuring its survival past the dark ages. After the Renaissance, political philosophers from Thomas Hobbes to Friedrich Nietzsche extolled Thucydides’ clear vision and realist’s grasp of politics and warfare. Thucydides link:  https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/thucydides

Other than to survive and understand events, those who seek to personally gain wealth or power from historical events will lose. They are on the wrong side of history. Only the understanding that the right side of history supports the evolutionary, collective survival of ourselves and all life on the planet may ultimately win.  An understanding that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness must be seen within the framework of our interdependent reality. Leave anyone out and we’re back to square one.