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Death and Fear…

I’m afraid of heights. I also don’t like flying. I don’t like big crowds and speaking in front of a group of people terrifies me. Funny how things that are simple and basic to some people make other peoples knees turn to jelly.

I don’t know where a lot of these fears came from. Some of them have just developed over the years. Some fears we have always harbored. I have always been afraid of death. I never even wanted to think about it until the last few years. It’s a subject that most of us definitely want to avoid. I think sometimes we feel like if we talk about it, it might jinx us and we will end up on the “mortar board” at some funeral home before the days out. Also, it’s a pretty depressing subject to broach. Nobody wants to be depressed, so nobody talks about it. I can’t remember the first time I thought about it, and was scared. I think it was when I was about four years old. Really, it’s true. As a little kid when I should have been thinking about playing cowboys and Indians, I was mulling over the great unknown. It’s been a bummer over the years.

Lately, I have come to the conclusion that by talking about death maybe we can make it less scary. I am not as afraid of it as I used to be. It’s not the little kid fear of going to hell and burning up in a blazing fire type fear anymore. It’s more of just an apprehension of something unknown. It’s a disappointment that I might not be around to see my loved ones complete most of their journey that they have started. It’s the conversations and contact with my family and friends that I don’t want to give up. The touches and looks of people you love, and who love you. Most of all, it turns out that it’s a selfish thing. Imagine that. I have so many selfish reasons for living that I don’t want to die and give them all up.

I don’t want to give up the beautiful sunny days like the one we had this past week. I don’t want to give up the good books that I enjoy reading every day. I don’t want to give up the glorious music I listen to every night.

But, it’s not what we want that we get is it?

There are so many theories and theological thesis about what happens to us after we die. It’s hard to pin one down and stick with it. One thing that I can assure you though is that it will be different from any of them. I don’t think that man has been given the knowledge, through any type of religion or science of what really happens. I am a Christian and believe he lived, but some people may not be the same as me. It may be that we just have peace. Peace would be nice; I’ll take that over some of what I’ve heard over the years.

I’ve seen a lot of people going through unbelievable suffering, or who no longer know who or what they are who would take peace too. There was a little old lady who was “rooming” next to my Mother at the nursing home a couple of years ago who was there one day and gone the next. She was in bad shape. She was ready for a rest, and she got it. I think if you could have broken through the wall of her senility she would have told you she was. A lot of times people outlive the desire to live, and when they do that, they are ready for peace. I am sure she wasn’t scared of it. Maybe welcomed it.

As long as we have the desire, then we should “keep on truckin’” as we used to say back in the 70’s. It’s when we lose the desire, due to things that are happening to us physically, that it becomes a hardship to keep on keeping on.

So, I guess as my perspective has changed from that little shivering four year old kid, who shouldn’t have even known what death was, to the more knowledgeable but equally unknowing 61 year old that I am now am. I still have my desire to live and hope that I keep it for a long, long time to come. I hope all of you do also. But, when we are ready for peace, I hope we find it and that it turns out to be better than we ever imagined.

Time…once so seemingly plentiful now comes at a premium. I have wasted so much of it doing inane and unimportant things that I hope God can forgive me. I have tried to use it wisely, but I am simply a child in an adult’s body, and things don’t always turn out right. Who’s to say what’s a waste and what ain’t anyway! I think my forgiveness need be for things I have thought…which barely took up any time, and not for what I haven’t done. Those folks who seem to have accomplished so much, with their fame and their fortune…they only have so much in the way of time too. And it can’t be bought now can it? Only “watched” and then sometimes too closely.

I dreamt last night that I had died. Those are always strange dreams anyway, but this one was exceedingly bizarre, being as I also still seemed to be mulling about the house at the same time. I was checking in on everyone to see how they were feeling. Odd. Dead, yet still worried about how everyone else was doing.

It does give me pause that my mind would send me down that path in the few hours per night which I sleep. It’s not fair to have your “little death” imposed upon by dreams of the big one. Nevertheless, I seemed non the worse for my demise, except for the lack of communication with those still left in the world of the living. And I did thankfully wake up this morning. Really odd what a person dreams….

I see from that dream that the world will go on without me, not missing a beat. Songs will still be written and sung, and the beautiful orange sunrises and sunsets will continue. The birds will still fly, and the rain will come down upon both the good and the evil. Scrumptious meals will be cooked, served and eaten. Good books will be read by lucky readers. People will still work too hard, play too little, and stress too much about things which will mean absolutely nothing in the end.

All which really matters is the legacy of love you leave behind, and you build that remembrance IF you deserve it, in the hearts of those who have known you, by being there for them.

It’s all sort of left me “melancholy baby…” though.

I hope I dream about something different tonight.

They say we have five senses….you all know them. Sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch.

Many experts will tell you we have many more.

Proprioception, time perception…is another, and some “experts” feel we have up to 50 or more senses. And yet, even if we have that many I feel we still do not, cannot perceive even a fraction of all which is going on around us…in us.

We perceive things as solid, when they most certainly cannot be solid, since they are comprised of atoms, which all of us learned in Science class are constantly in motion. How are atoms which are in motion can be perceived as solid could be due to a human sense which causes the atoms which are in motion to cease moving only when we look at them and have the expectation in our mind that a solid piece of wood or cement will be there instead of a bunch of whirling disjointed atoms.

Think I’m crazy yet?

And what about the things which occupy the space around us, which we consider empty. Would it surprise to learn that some folks consider ever space in the Universe occupied by something. A matrix? That idea is much, much older than the Keanu Reeves movies.

I wonder how many more colors there are in the color spectrum we cannot perceive, how many more sounds and vibrations are there which we cannot hear, smells that elude us, subtle tastes we cannot discern, touches from Angels which we cannot feel but which protect us from harm. When we look in the starry night sky, how beautiful it is…but how much beautiful could it be? I took a picture last night of the stars…straight up above my head. When first I looked, there were the stars that had been visible. For kicks I started “expanding” the photo as one is able to with an iPhone until the entire screen was solid with the tiny red specs if stars I had not been able to perceive, but which were there in my moment of conscious ability to see them.

My Grandma once told me to be careful what I said or did, because God was watching me.

I believe she was right…the creator is right here in this same room…I just can’t believe enough, I just don’t have enough faith right now to see him, but I think one day I will, we will, certainly be able to.

During out lives, some of us change. We change our opinions. We change our philosophy. We change our outlook on life and on people. I think I understand where people are coming from sometimes, but sometimes I am wrong. People think they know where I am coming from,but sometimes they are wrong. I think we are here to serve and be kind.

To all people.

Not just to those who agree with us on our philosophy, our morals, and especially our judgement. I have spent a whole lot of my life being judgmental. Learning to turn that situation loose has been extremely hard and it’s still an ongoing battle every day. So I hope to keep my most private thoughts mostly in my head….which is where they belong. I hope everyone else can take a look at themselves and try and do the same.

Mother Teresa said: “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” Very simple, but very deep. If we spend so much time trying to decide who is right and who is wrong about any given thing, that is time that is taken up not loving others.

Quite honestly, I believe that you don’t even have to interact with people physically to love them. You don’t even have to know them personally to love them. You certainly cannot love them if you judge them to be beyond the philosophy OF your love. I can’t understand how I can love someone and condemn them at the same time. Is that not an impossibility?

Seeing people flee their countries in order to try and save themselves and their families is distressing to put it mildly. It is a human tragedy not witnessed in this generation. Many, many of them are dying. Men, women and babies drowning at sea. All taking that uncertain risk, in order to escape an almost certain death.

Most of them are Muslim, although many are Christian…seeing as how the Christian churches in this area of the world, which had been under the protection of the strong man dictatorships in Iraq and Egypt, are now totally unprotected.

I was reading through some comments on posts today where someone was expressing regret over the death of so many babies and children…no matter if they were Muslim. Another person commented in that same post with a reply which I knew well, and which I consider the most repugnant and vulgar line ever uttered by a human being. He said he didn’t care about the death of these babies and young children because: “nits make lice” That line makes my skin crawl with rage.

It was first uttered by an ex preacher turned militia leader named John Milton Chivington. He was the Colorado militia leader who said, concerning the Indians in that territory during 1864: “Damn any man who is a sympathizer with the Indians. I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right under God’s heaven to use any means to kill Indians. Kill and scalp all, big and little. Nits make lice.”

So at Sand Creek, in November of 1864, he and 700 men slaughtered, raped, mutilated and desecrated an estimated 200 or more Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, two thirds of whom were woman and children, who were there supposedly under “protection” of the government with Chief Black Kettle, a peace chief as their leader. Nothing was ever done to punish Chivington for his leadership and participation in this heinous act against people whose sole sin was ownership of land which other men coveted, and a difference in beliefs and customs. When I first read this account in Michener’s “Centennial” many years ago, I thought it was fiction. Research showed it was not.

I go back then to the current situation of these Syrian and Iraqis refugees whose homes have been destroyed, who are being herded into camps with little or nothing to eat, no hygienic facilities, no dignity and little hope for a good future. I see the clips of their women and children…the innocent children. They are being displaced mostly because of their beliefs and customs, and because someone else covets their property.

It infuriates me about the comparison to the 19th century Native Americans. Is a massacre of these current refugees imminent if something isn’t done? Are there more John Chivingtons out there, both overseas and here in America? Of course there are. The fact that someone would use Chivington’s words prove it.

I hope if I have any Facebook friends out there who feel like a John Chivington, they will just go ahead and unfriend me after they read this. I don’t need them.

We are Afraid

….of things which are happening half way around the world. And I know that we have to be cautious. But, if we live our lives afraid of forces who do heinous things, and dramatically and cinematically record them just to make us afraid, then we have given over the victory to them.

Some members of humanity who are or were madmen have always done things such as this, but have never before had the ability to project them to the entire world on a practically uncontrolled and unregulated new technology. Two beheadings of innocent men is an inhuman act but, I can’t imagine the kind of fear that Vlad the Impaler would have caused if he had been capable of putting his deeds on the Internet.

We didn’t have the internet between 1958 and 1962 when over 45 million Chinese people starved to death…so very few people even know about it. The internet wasn’t there when 3 million or so people were tortured to death or hacked to death in the killing fields of Cambodia during the early 70’s.

Stalin’s forced starving of up to 12 million Ukrainians during the 30’s (because the Ukraine wanted independence…sound familiar?? And he was our ally??) is scarcely known of. What is Facebook had been around then?

Many, many acts of tremendous, inhuman violence have occurred during human history. Way too many to mention here. Most of these acts are so deeply buried in history books that it is hard to seek them out and find them, and really hard to believe they really occurred. They were only documented on the written page, with few if any photographs. There were no “viral videos” of them.

If I die in an attack on this country by these crazed terrorists, I will not do it because I am hiding in my house and not living my life. Screw them, I refuse it! I hope to make a trip to the beach next month and I’m not going to sit around and worry about them.

Let the countries in the neighborhood of these killers put the boots on the ground, or let them be taken over. I don’t think they will let that happen. Saudi Arabia itself has one of the most well equipped and largest armies in the world. Outside of Israel, they are the strongest in the area. Maybe they think their army is “just for show” so let them put it to work. We certainly have provided them enough money one way or the other. Also how about Jordan and Turkey…the countries who want the U.S. to foot the bill and provide the manpower. Let them do it. Their excuse is that we caused it, and that may have some truth to it. They want us in, then they want us out, then they want us in.

There are many more things that I am afraid of, besides the beasts in the Middle East.

I’m afraid of the loss of love within families, friends and communities.

I’m afraid of seeing another child die at the hands of their Father or Mother, because we are unwilling to stop the drug problems in this country or because we are afraid to admit that we need many more facilities and experts to treat mental illness, we need more and better trained workers to help.

I’m afraid of another kid being mistakenly killed in his bed by some “gang” member who is there because he had nothing better to do, maybe nothing to do at all.

I’m afraid we have spent way, way too much money on fighting wars in foreign countries and way, way too little money on creating jobs for young people, and on education. If we had taken all the money we have spent on war in the last 13 years and applied it to education, not one student would have had to pay for a college education.

I’m afraid we are becoming creatures who depend too much on electronic devices as a way to express ourselves, and not enough time looking into each other’s eyes when we speak.

I’m afraid we are going down the path of sacrificing our emotions, our privacy, our finances, and our freedom to the idol of the “cloud” What happens when we turn so much of our lives over to it, that if a solar flare brings it all down we would be hard put to survive? Are we there already?

As I was exercising on 911, I was looking out the big window in the front of the room and saw at least 6 jets flying from West to East. They were not the ones who leave the big puffy contrails, but the ones in a hurry to get somewhere, whose contrail vanishes in a minute or two. I bet there were a lot of fighter planes in the sky that day. We have a lot of them in this country. We have a pretty damn secure country really. We have a pretty great country really.

It’s going to be a real shame if we let fear mongers, warmongers, professional people dividers, the media, the politicians, the mega financial institutions, or the terrorists scare us into abandoning or giving away the freedoms we have been given in this country.

I really think if anybody with ill intent hits the beaches of our country they will be in for a big surprise.

At some point during the day today, the names of the people who died at the World Trade Center will be read aloud again. The innocent people who died there. We pay tribute to those heroes who died on that day, while they continue to whisper in the wind: “pay attention, don’t let our lives be wasted…it could happen again”

I personally think they died in order to entangle our country in an endless war. Not a war against a country or a group of people, but a war against an idea. A war against a word. How do you win that kind of war? How do you know when you have won? We certainly haven’t been doing much winning since that day. It would be a miracle to put this country back to the way it was on September 10th 2001. I don’t know if it will ever happen.

Americans have lost much of their privacy and personal freedoms since that day. We all know about the Patriot act, but there were and are many, many other changes to our Civil liberties which have been promulgated since that day. Enough to fill a book, many books really. Our freedoms took an extreme hit that day those innocent people died.

Presidents gained the power to practically wage unlimited war, through the AUMF…the Authorization for the use of Military Force. Originally passed to use against Al Qaeda, the Bush administration used it, along with puffed up UN sanctions in order to go to war in Iraq. Millions died.

The Obama administration took it to a whole new level by using it as a basis to drone kill practically ever person they considered a “prominent ” member of any terror related group, including U.S. Citizens. Hundreds or thousands of innocent people have died as collateral damage. Thousands of lawyers are employed to insure the killings are legal under the AUMF.

I’d hate to be Bush or Obama if there is Universal justice for the deaths of innocents.

So in the ensuing fifteen years your life has changed drastically and probably forever, though many don’t realize it, because they don’t feel it….yet.

Look to those who have profited since the day those innocent people died. Follow the money, as one of my friends says, and you will draw closer to the purveyors and the people movers who may have actually wanted this eternal war to happen, or at the least, saw it as a way to line their pockets, and swell their bank accounts. I haven’t got time tonight to make a list of the dirty bastards. You can Google them if you are interested. It’s not hard to find.

Another 911 anniversary today. The fifteenth. I sincerely pray for the lives of those innocent people killed that day, and those who have died since then because of the effects of that day.

They didn’t know when they went to work that day, or got on a plane that morning, that they would end up being sacrifices on the altar of the need for eternal war, greed and the need for a reduction in freedom for America and the entire world in general.

Others look at what happened that day, and based on what they heard on the news media….or what they thought the news media was giving them, have drawn a totally different conclusion than what I have drawn. And that’s OK. It’s fine.

Everything is opinion, and perception is always going to be reality.

Yesterday I had both and they were sort of unexpected. We went to Church and my daughter Kirsten was scheduled to sing a solo. She told me it was a new song and it was one she really liked, and it had spoke to her immediately when she first heard it. When she came up to the front and looked back to the sound engineer for the track to start, he shook his head…”nothing there” he said.

My daughter kind of had that look on her face which said “this is not good” but…as things go, the CD wouldn’t work and she undertook to sing the song acapella. She started out on key and her voice built as she sang the song…I was able to listen closely to the words of the song “Blessing” more than I would have normally been able to…there was no music, no melody to get in the way of the beautiful lyrics and the story they told. It was a blessing.

Later…we went to my niece Shanna’s house for dinner. Her little daughter Jenna, who has Down’s syndrome, met me at the door and I went into the living room and started to play with her. I haven’t been around her as much as I should have and I was a little worried about communicating with her…but we got right on, started playing with the big mega “stacking” blocks. I started to sing a song just for the heck of it…I think it was “Unchained Melody” She looked at me and just stared and then she got a funny little look and took me by the hand and led me back to her little room. She pointed at her CD player and turned it on so that the music played and then pointed at me. She was telling me “look this is where my music comes from”

From then on the rest of the time I was around her I could feel the communications coming from her through her eyes..the melody coming from her heart. No words had to be said, no lyrics had to be written. I know it must be hard to have that music in your heart without a way to speak it…how frustrating it must be at times when you know what you want to say but cannot say it…, you know what you want to share but other people cannot receive your sharing. So….the song without the music was a blessing…and so was the little girl’s music from her heart without the words. Both meant so much to me.

If I thought there was a chance to change America through what I write on Facebook, I would go all out with pen and pencil blazing to change what is, in my humble opinion, wrong in my beloved country. But there’s never been an instance of which I am aware where I have changed someone’s minds about their beliefs.

This is a reactive media. It’s an emotion driven ride where many people let others do their thinking and their writing for them. The media is inundated with “dueling memes” on all the hot button issues of the day. And in the end, hardly anyone’s Facebook persona is the same as their real personality. We all write from the perspective of our own positions, not from the perspective of how we would treat each other if we met in Wal-Mart, much less really get to know each other by becoming real life acquaintances. It’s a sad and futile way to try and deal with living in the real world.

We are taken advantage of by the demagogues and self serving political worms because they know all the right strings to pull. Up becomes down. The meekest and most polite people become right fighters for the wrong causes. It causes my heart to break, and my eyes to fill with tears at the injustices being heaped upon us from all sides, like hot coals on a pig in the ground. All we are lacking is the Apple in our mouth, and the oligarchic theocratic rulers will have us for dinner.

Longfellow wrote: “and in despair I bowed my head, there is no peace on Earth I said. For hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth good will to men”

Common decency is being replaced by the boorishness of the bullies who will say any vulgar thing. How do we as Americans honor this type of attitude as acceptable? Is this the new normal? Will we go back to dueling before long to settle our differences and protect our honor?

Do we let a vocal minority of lawbreakers dictate morality for all of us? They do not even represent the majority of their own group! Yet we would hold them sacred above the law.

I’m puzzled, I’m confused, but most of all I am disheartened and surprised.

As I look at my watch to see what time it is, and then at the calendar on the wall to see the date I realize that there is nothing, nothing whatsoever that I can do about the 67 years and 11 months that have already passed by on these two instruments of measurement.

All I can do is pray that the time that is ahead which I have left is

spent being more helpful to others, more loving than I have been, more

giving than I think I should be, and most of all more appreciative of

all that I have been given, right down to the tiniest tick of that watch

that I have on my wrist……