Have you noticed the face of Empire looming over you?
It’s there. With its hot breath and sharpened teeth and its cold, threatening eyes. You have undoubtedly felt it, like a bewildering cloud of chaos all around you that you can’t quite pinpoint. But have you noticed it, with your powers of rational attention and scrutiny?
This isn’t about Trump or Clinton, or Sanders; or the Brexit vote, or the EU plutocrats whose panties are in a giant twist; it’s not about Parliament or Congress or Russia or Iran—despite that most of us can’t seem to stop screaming for a savior or a scapegoat, and preferably both.
It’s more about that latter thing.
Maybe you almost take a glance at reality, in fleeting moments, when anger and frustration rise up in you as yet another crap-tastic, draconian law is passed. (Do we need more laws? Really? Are the so-called wars on terror, drugs, and poverty not being won by the first gazillion laws already extant in the western world? No?)
Perhaps you catch a glimpse each day when corporate news just can’t wait to fill your face with hopelessly skewed stories of endless actual wars and looting which our militaries, and a gaggle of private contractors, are getting away with unchecked. These news “authorities” always insist that the position they are vomiting is normal, even necessary. They claim it is a response to what someone else, somewhere, is doing or saying or being—either on the “other side” of party politics—or halfway across the world.
They may call it liberation, or spreading freedom, or maintaining national security, or self-defense. Or, most damned absurd, “ensuring peace.” Bomb people into peace. Starve and maim and degrade people into prosperity and democratic beliefs. Destroy them into enlightenment.
Whatever news outlets say it is, and whatever else it may be, it is murder and disintegration. It is violence, the machine of imperial control. It isn’t “normal”; it is not “necessity”. It is consensual human sacrifice, and the sacrifice also of so much more.
We like to believe we live in a time when chained men and women are no longer dragged to the top of a pyramid to have their beating hearts sawed out of them, and when children are not burned alive in sacrifice to some unseen god.
Mmm, yeah. Do we?
Possibly, long ago you recognized the endless deception and game-playing and brainwashing in all of this—government, business, economics, the justice system, media, “national security”, the good ol’ banksters, what we call “education”—and you have simply withdrawn your attention from these things as much as you can.
But in spite of looking away, staying busy, diving into distraction, working long hours, taking care of your family and keeping your head down—in other words, just trying to “maintain” and ignore the chaos and deliberate harm swirling all around you—you are still affected. We are all still affected. What’s more, like it or not, turning a blind eye equals . . . you guessed it . . . tacit consent.
Yeah, none of us like to think about that.
There are obvious, horrifying ways to hurt and oppress people: bombs, bullets, rape, torture, starvation. The list is long. And there are insidious, less obvious ways to hurt and oppress people: the “quiet horrors” of a deceptively “free” society.
Soulless jobs, debt at every turn, toxic drinking water, crumbling bridges, paranoid and aggravating hassle at every airport, kids who somehow graduate from high school who don’t know where Iraq is located on a map. (It is not because kids are somehow magically becoming stupider.) This list is also long. Longer, in fact, than the heinous but obvious cruelties. These are bombs and rape and bullets of the mind and heart.
There is constant division and distrust between us—as individuals, groups, public sector vs. private sector; between factions and ideologies and memes and orientations and attitudes and religions. Who, outside ourselves, can “make” us fear and distrust people we’ve never met? And who is it, again, that benefits from our doing that?
Somewhere, sometime, we became identified with these divisions, so it seems crucially important to defend them. We are invested in them, continually pouring our sense of self-value into their bottomless well. We think these categories and belief systems are us. Long ago banished to the anxious sea below our everyday thoughts, we “forget” how strongly we have bought into all of the fear and the endless opinions of other people.
And we are convinced we’re right. We have to keep a death grip on being “right”—about politics, taxes, racial issues, the latest “facts” in our profession, methods of parenting, on whatever narratives we identify with—or our whole house of cards topples inward. (Those cards falling inward is the best thing that can happen to us, though it usually feels like a massive crisis and we’ll do nearly anything to avoid it.) The emotional dissonance is extreme—i.e., our constant attempts to avoid more pain. Even when we don’t remember why.
None of us actually escape the chaos. It’s a peculiar form of belief, and I know it well, which thinks we can “escape” anything that is starkly in our faces by simply trying to ignore it. Notice the T-Rex in the rearview? Think it will go away if we just don’t look in the mirror? Peekaboo, baby.
We, humanity, have an interesting relationship with mirrors. In fact, I’ll call it a love-hate relationship. The mechanism of a mirror is surprisingly simple, but the purpose of a mirror is profound.
This post may sound like some form of mini-sermon. But I can tell you it is more in the nature of a confession. It’s not a confession to you, good readers who have made it this far, and whom I welcome, but to myself:
• Sometimes I forget to remember.
• First you have to dare to notice, then perceive what is actually there.
• Truth, by its very nature, is revolutionary.
• There’s no protection in ignorance, clearly, and the fake so-called “bliss” of it gets shattered regularly . . . so, note to self.
• “Know Thyself” is the best advice ever given on this planet; no wonder it’s the first thing we’re discouraged from doing.
• And last, but definitely not least: “Objects in this mirror are closer than they appear.”