Comment by Rick Massengale on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 3:05am

Political Activism is a dead cat, in a sack that has been thrown on our door step.  It's been there a while,,, It's been smelling for  a while But, the smell is not quiet strong enough yet to knock us out of our comfort zone.

If it were anything other than a dead cat, we would have been in the streets a year into this rich mans war-poor mans fight we have been engaged in for over a decade.  We would have been in the streets with the 99% movement after Wall Street pillaged the world then blamed it on the avg. home owner. We would have been in the street after the first drone strike. We would have been the streets as the working poor could no longer make enough to live on and then were criminalized for receiving a couple hundred bucks a month for food.

We can blog, define, discuss, whine, snipe at each other BUT until we wake up, take a good smell of the dead cat and say enough of this is enough and more of the same will not make it better we might as well stop putting down kibbles and bitts and kitty litter because the cat is dead.

Comment by Keith Saylor on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 8:04am

It is a blessing to know a consciousness anchored in and a conscience informed by the immediacy of Presence.

It is a blessing in Presence wherein there is no faith in and hope for outward political power to realize outward political agendas animated by outward political activism; instead there is peace and long-suffering now and in every moment and in every event and in all things experienced directly. Being present in the Presence is to know peace, justice, equality, and happiness in every moment without expectation of these ideals some time in the future and nostalgia for these ideals lost sometime in the past. Presence is sufficient unto all things and in itself. I am thankful for certain faith in a consciousness anchored in and conscience informed by Presence. In Presence, I am home and know divine peace. In Presence, peace is a way of being, justice is a way of being, equality is a way of being. They are the natural rights in Presence. They are not outward tools to fashion powerful outward institutions imposing abstracted ideals with outward weapons. 

Comment by Forrest Curo on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 11:29am

Rick M, political activism is how one speaks truth to people who don't want to hear it. It's a way of people standing up to say how things ought to be, not expecting our owners will suddenly want that too (although sometimes that happens) but because (as someone else put it awhile ago) "If they were silent, the stones would cry out." For awhile, back in the 60's, many people were imagining that enough of the public saw through the respectable illusions that we could soon correct the violence & injustice of "this filthy rotten system". As conditions worsened over the decades since, people have sporadically turned out against the most glaring abuses, out of a sort of desperate habitual feeling of obligation -- but yes, we know that nonviolent protests won't currently improve matters, while violence would make them worse.

So what are we actually called to do? The best sense I can get of this is: Our job is to keep from being fooled, to avoid being seduced into using a language of falsehood in hopes that one can 'speak truth to "power" ' that way. (Truth simply doesn't translate into Deceptionese.) To change the world? Not our option. But those stones ought to be hollering soon, the way it's all been going.

Comment by Rick Massengale on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 12:53pm

Well said Forrest

I was very close to that fine line of "being right" which can only increase self PRIDE.

I listen for the stones soon as well

Comment by Olivia on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 1:01pm

Hi Rick!

I accept your comment of self-censure if you feel that's accurate in your case.   But I found your last post on this very moving -- much more so than I was expecting when it starts out with a reference to "dead cat".     I believe you are one of the stones crying out. 

I do wish you peace and inner stillness, but if that leads you to keep crying out for more divine truth and mercy in our world, then please keep it up.

Comment by Keith Saylor on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 2:25pm

It is edifiying to acknowledge and recognize in the words of others a consciousness and conscience not shared. It is equally edifying to acknowledge and recognize in the words of others a consciousness and conscience cordiality experienced.

It is one thing to share personal conscience ... it is another to advocate for and support the imposition of a conscience on others through the outward weapons of political and religious instutionalization ... that is the tyranny of political activism. 

Watch those who demonize others who do not share their consciousness and conscience with words like "deception." Demonization is the tyranny of one conscience over another.

Comment by Rick Massengale on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 2:29pm

Hi Olivia

Thank you for your kind words.  They are a blessing.  Thank you.

As I read Forests post.. I realized that I had typed those words more from anger than from love.

I don't regret them... I must just learn to fling them from a different place other than a "greater than thou"

Thank You again

Your Friend

Rick

Comment by Forrest Curo on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 3:38pm

re 'deception', for them as wants footnotes:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/03-6

---------

Rick, it isn't that anger is a reason for shame, or never due to love... It's just another affliction: addictive and leading to delusions of strength. 'Flinging,' well... I thought you had a pretty good rant going but after writing a lifetime worth of 'Another poem about the lingering death of democracy' I just find that cat getting stiffer all the same.

"I want to go home to America;they told me about it in school..." [and that was a goood one!] but we're just getting to live in 'interesting times' instead.

What really makes people crazy is trying to be somebody they aren't!

Comment by Olivia on 3rd mo. 3, 2014 at 4:41pm

Keith, thank you for your comments.  I agree that it is wrong to demonize others and does lead to tyranny of one people over another.   I also agree with you that sharing our differences cordially is a great balm of sorts....   thank you for supporting us being able to look at that distinction. 

Rick, just to share.... You said you wrote that in anger and again I understand your point about that.  I just thought I'd share back though what you are providing me in terms of "a case study in political activism".   When people have been tyrannized or have felt tyrannized (to use the language we're grabbing onto at the moment), to me it is a beautiful thing to see them shed those chains and that can very much look like political activism.   I am not really trying to make that point.  But am just sharing that when I read your feelings about how dead this Spirit within us is and how much injustice we accept without taking to the streets, I felt in your words the power that turns the tide.    I have similarly experienced this feeling, that moves me deeply, when I've had the rare opportunity to be present while a large protest occurs.   Once I saw in DC thousands of people walking down the hill, from a long way off, all saying no to war and man, there were a ton of them.  I kept watching the crest of that hill because what was so moving to me was the endlessness of this crowd... the fact that as far as the eye could see more and more people were taking to the streets and all saying as one "we will NOT support war" filled my heart with the most profound hope.  Moments like those feel to me like it's not completely inconceivable that God's reign (in our consciences and hearts) could be possible, yes here.... yes, now.   No need to all feel the same about God either.   We just were of one mind and heart and conscience about nonviolence.  

We leave these events and continue to fail in other areas of our lives and stumble all over that wish to live non-violently with one another.  But for me it is enough that we are moved from time to time in this way and that our spirits can convey One Spirit, One Wholeness, just for a time.  That we were then, if not now, simply a part of a divine upwelling that said "ENOUGH".  

This is what I see as the best within 'political activism' / the recognition that it can actually be God's action in the world, at it's best.   Though of course, it is frequently done with less unison and less hope of change, and less divine power to it,  etc etc.  

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